


bridge jumpers

by stelmarias



Category: RWBY
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hunger Games Setting, Angst, F/F, Romance, and trying to figure out how to let your baby sister lead a revolution, but that's six extra grams of protein bay-bee, cracking an egg open to find three plot yolks instead of one and going 'wot', first chapter pov's blake's second's yang's third belongs to weiss, oh sorry about the math. that's my bad. really., soulmates and plucky protagonists, strap in we're about to get a little witcher season 1 with our timelines, we're all here to Overcome Our Trauma from our eccentric carceral state
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:33:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24426574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stelmarias/pseuds/stelmarias
Summary: You might say that things started to go wrong when Ruby Rose won the 74th Hunger Games.In truth, it all started much earlier than that.[A Hunger Games AU]
Relationships: Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long, also past sinn bc of reasons, and more to come in the End Times, background/brief seamonkeys, light dustings of past casanova!yang as a treat
Comments: 45
Kudos: 150





	bridge jumpers

**Author's Note:**

> Knowledge of RWBY canon is highly recommended, while passing familiarity of Hunger Games canon will probably be sufficient.
> 
>  **Warnings** for character death and traumatic events on the level typical of the Hunger Games, as well as RWBY. Somewhat explicit depictions of violence and gore, though not often. References to grooming, sex trafficking, and oppressive totalitarian regimes and tactics. Minor references to reproductive coercion.  
>    
> Yes, I have done what I want with how much time tributes spend in the Capitol before their Games. It doesn't make sense. That's fine. 
> 
> Edited 17/6/2020.

_“Did you love Annie right away, Finnick?” I ask._

_“No.” A long time passes before he adds, “She crept up on me.”_

-Mockingjay, p. 124

#### *****

  
A bridge jumper is a gambler who places an unusually large wager on a single tribute in the Games. Most of the time, these kinds of bets are made on short odds. The kind that all but guarantee a return, no matter how paltry. But there are always gamblers who try their hand at the long shots. The all-or-nothing play with a payout that'll either change their lives, or have them step off the nearest bridge.

#### **

Condensing several weeks into three hours is quite a feat, especially when you consider how many cameras were going at once. Whoever puts together the highlights of the Hunger Games has to choose what sort of story to tell. This year, for the first time, they tell a love story, but the true arc is one purely of tragedy. 

Tukson and Sienna are careful in their coaching for the interview that happens after the recap. Blake’s mentors tell her to be a despondent, pitiful thing, full of heartbreak and misery.

It’s not hard to reach for.

She’s only fourteen. The ornate, hand-carved victor’s chair she sits in seems to swallow her whole, a seat with a high enough back that it feels more like a headstone, an obelisk, than a throne.

Clover Ebi, her interviewer, has deviated from his typically vibrant attire to don something more in line with the tone of the moment. He’s wearing a black, double-breasted waistcoat, gold filigree lining his lapels and quarters, though his sleeves are still notably absent. A silk cravat covers his neck, while his legs are covered in a thick, shiny leather. 

It matches her mourning dress, a black, see-through chiffon gown of mourning, embroidered with dark, flowering vines that crawl and climb to cover most of her skin. It claws at her neckline, tight and choking, and she still feels exposed. The most intimate parts of her body are protected underneath the bodice with only a short, dark skirt, and a top that's more straps than fabric.

Blake’s grateful to Clover. There are a thousand questions he could be asking instead of the easy, leading questions he sends her way. There are ones she could never hope to answer — _Why did you do it?_ at the top of the list — but he asks the ones she can instead.

When the interview seems to approach its natural end, he thanks her for her time before speaking again. 

“One last thing, Miss Belladonna,” Clover says, reaching into the front pocket of his vest. “We found this on Adam, after the hovercraft took his body.” He pulls out the ring her partner never had a chance to propose with, and holds it out to her.

Blake reaches out with trembling fingers and closes them around it. She’s never held it before, never seen it up close.

The ring is made of folded metals, gleaming ribbons of smooth, silver alloys that weave around each other to form a textured ridge. She traces along the outside with a doleful brush of her thumb. 

Blake tries to speak, but she’s voiceless, mouth moving without sound.

Clover takes over instead, painted lips forming around the words that will seal her fate, casting her in a role that will protect and shackle her. 

“There’s an old story I know from your district,” Clover says mournfully, and here, now his eyes are finally filled with tears. He stops for a moment to blot them dry, and takes another steadying breath before continuing. “It’s of a princess who falls in love with a knight she can never have, a forbidden romance. In the end, she throws herself into the sea after they bring back her lover’s ring from where he fell in battle.”

Blake keeps her gaze fixed on her own hands, rolling the loop of silver between them, back and forth, back and forth. 

“You’re our princess, now, Blake,” he says, giving her a warm smile. “But I don’t think Panem could bear it if we were to ever lose you.” 

Clover reaches forward to grasp her hands in his. He gives what he means as a reassuring squeeze, but she’s far too gone to have this man, strange and foreign and fake, offer her any comfort. Even now, she’s pulling deeper into herself, tides of grief carrying her farther and farther from the shore.

He lets her go, and turns to face the beetle-black lens of the camera directly, a forlorn smile fixed on his face.

“That’s the last we have from Blake Belladonna, winner of the 68th Hunger Games. This is Clover Ebi, signing off. Goodnight, and may the odds be ever in your favor.”

#### ***

It’s the job of the Gamemakers to keep each year exciting and fresh for Panem. Different arenas, different tones, different restrictions. It’s why a seventeen-year-old Yang Xiao Long can win her Games, for little else other than the fact that she can fight with her hands and her feet in a year where there are no weapons at all.

The 70th Hunger Games had ended entirely too soon. The majority of tributes had gotten their hands on knives and blades and swords and bows almost immediately in the beginning, a pool of competitors with too many trying their luck around the Cornucopia. Years of planning culminated in a spectacle that lasted less than two days, an arena painstakingly built barely explored beyond its inner ring. The victory went to a boy from District 1, and the loss went to a city-state deprived of its usual fix of entertainment.

So the Capitol switches it up a year later.

The 71st Hunger Games open on a Cornucopia much more aptly named, stocked only with food and survival gear. And no amount of money or pleading from sponsors and viewers can convince the Gamemakers to allow so much as a nail file in the tributes’ silver parachutes.

Most Careers – the tributes from Districts 1, 2, and 4 – can hold their own in a fistfight. They’re all taught hand-to-hand from the time they start their training. How to grapple, wrestle, how to break holds and leverage the strength they’re easily afforded as the darlings of their districts. They’re old enough and fed enough that by the time they volunteer, their size and strength alone give them the upper hand against the tributes from the outer districts.

But more attention is paid to making sure Careers know their way around an armory. To learn a dozen ways to gut a man in five seconds with twice as many tools. In an arena where tributes were left without an arsenal, Yang Xiao Long becomes a human weapon.

She kills her district partner, a boy named Mercury Black, two days into an alliance. It’s a move that shocks the Capitol and the rest of Panem – a cold-blooded betrayal that violates a core, if unwritten, tenet of the Games. You don’t kill your own, if you can avoid it. It’s an easy way to alienate yourself from your district if you come home a winner, and it’s a coin toss when it comes to sponsorships. For all of the Capitol’s glee in watching children tear each other apart, many of them seem to balk at a lack of loyalty.

But Yang never had to covet the attention of the Capitol before, never had to curry favor from her audience. No one from District 12 had ever won the Games, so Yang was left without the lifeline of a sponsor. She didn’t even have a mentor.

Officially, the kill belongs to a short, stocky boy from District 1. He breaks Mercury’s neck while he tries to drag himself to safety, both legs broken by an irate Yang an hour or so prior. She hadn’t bothered to finish the job, choosing to bolt instead.

She’s more thorough with the rest, though. Even if she retches after every broken neck.

Yang Xiao Long’s fisticuffs earn her a victor’s crown and a new arm. What had started as a harmless scrape on her knuckles on the third day of her Games had blackened by the sixth. Necrotizing infection had eaten the tissue below her skin, tissue so drenched in death that even Capitol medicine couldn’t bring it back to life.

Hate isn’t the right word for the way Blake feels about Yang Xiao Long at first, though she thinks it’s more apt for the way Yang feels about her. It’s not indifference, either — it’s hard not to be intrigued by an underdog.

It’s the same with any victor from a district that doesn’t train their tributes. Their animosity burns like ozone in the air on their tours here, and then again, when they return as mentors in the Capitol. 

Tukson likes to tell her that the edges of their resentment are worn smooth eventually. Tempered by the realization that the Games never really end, not even for Careers — there’s a companionship to be found in an equalizing sort of misery.

But there’s no companionship between Yang and Blake here, six months after Yang’s Games, on the ninth stop of her Victory Tour.

Yang still moves and thinks and breathes like she’s still in the arena, like everything and everyone is still a threat. Even at a celebratory dinner in her honor.

Her prosthetic shakes lightly with the adrenaline thrumming through her upper arm. Her pupils are blown wide, twin circles of black expanding to overtake the unreal lilac of her irises until only a thin ring remains.

It’s hard not to look at them, she thinks, chancing another glance. Up close, Blake can’t help but marvel at the striking hue of Yang’s eyes. They’re the kind Capitol citizens can only dream of for themselves. No surgeon in the Capitol can replicate what a schoolteacher’s daughter from District 12 was naturally born with.

“Where’s the incision?” Yang asks, staring down at her plate, startling Blake out of her staring. As District 4’s most recent winner, she’s seated on her left, while her mentor sits on her right. Yang taps experimentally against the carapace of the lobster in front of her with a fork. “Where am I supposed to cut?”

This, too, is familiar with tributes in the outer districts, unused to if downright unfamiliar with seafood of any kind.

Weiss — Blake thinks that’s her name — is occupied in conversation with Mayor Lionheart, and her charge has turned to her instead. Yang’s head turns up, looks at Blake with a flummoxed expression, eyes wide.

“There’s no incision,” she says quietly. “You tear the claw out, like this,” and she pops the appendage from its socket from the animal on her own plate.

Yang squints, but follows suit, claw coming loose easily under the same hands that had done the same and worse to human beings.

“How is it killed, then? Electrification?” says Yang, eyeing the strips of meat poking out from the tear of the claw she rests on her plate. She pulls, inspecting, at the bright red of the right antenna.

“No,” Blake replies, memories of diving for lobster floating to the forefront of her mind. “They’re caught and placed in tanks.” If she’s honest, she hates the things. She could never blame them for fighting back when she plucked them from the seafloor, even if empathy couldn’t soothe the pain of their claws closing around her small fingers. “Then they’re boiled.”

“While still alive?” Yang exclaims. The color starts to drain slightly from Yang’s face, and a golden strand of hair from her high coiffure slips loose with the exclamation.

Blake shrugs, but her appetite is gone, too. In the more western parts of District 4, where she was born, the taste of the rich skews more towards carefully prepared raw fish. Here, where large strips of the ocean floor are covered in toxic sediment, the difficulty of finding crustaceans safe enough to eat makes them a delicacy. Her father always said there wasn’t enough meat on them to bother.

“If they’re dead for too long, they can make you sick. The cooks keep them in tanks before they’re served,” she explains.

“You keep them in cages just to kill them later? That’s kind of disgusting,” Yang says, frowning. She pushes her plate carelessly away from her, folding her arms, and the motions draw the attention of some of the people around them. “So everyone in this district likes to play with their food, not just Careers.”

“Yang,” says Weiss, voice high and warning. Across the table, Tukson, her co-mentor, flicks his eyes up towards Blake’s, and takes a careful drink from his glass.

It’s a jab at her. The girl Blake had mentored in Yang’s Games hadn’t just been gifted with knives, but overly fond of using them. She was one of only two tributes to try making her own weapon, figuring out how to flintknap a crude but sharp enough cutting tool four days into the Games. She’d gotten far enough with it to last until the final four. 

The girl had liked to draw out her victims’ last moments of life after catching them in net traps Blake had worked to send her. Two of them had lasted two days in the arena at her hands. If you spend enough time draining fish, you learn how long an animal can cling to life, based on how you make your cuts. 

Yang had personally killed her after watching her work on the pair of twelve-year-olds from District 9. 

Blake doesn’t mean to take the bait, but she’s always on edge during these dinners, restless so close to home.

The winter does little to erode District 4’s natural beauty, and the sharp taste of salt in the air — even now, in the climate-controlled dining room of Justice Building — chafes at her heart. 

“No, Yang’s right,” she says, picking up her claw. “I don’t usually enjoy lobster, or its preparation. But we’ve abandoned some of our more barbaric practices. Did you know that before the Rebellion, we still used to cut the fins off of sharks for food?”

She breaks the joint with her hands, with a percussive _snap_ that reveals white, fatty strips of tissue inside. Yang flinches at the sound, so very much like the crack of bone when wrenched apart.

“They couldn’t swim, after. But our fishermen just threw them back into the water anyway. They could pretend they weren’t killing them, even though they couldn’t survive after, couldn’t fend off predators. Can you imagine not being able to move, just waiting for something else to kill you? I think it sounds awful.”

She turns her head with slow, deliberate indifference to meet Yang’s eyes, and almost starts in surprise at the fury that had flared up behind them in an instant, pupils dilating to consume irises turned almost red in the refracted candlelight. She’s vaulted over an invisible line she should never have touched, never even breathed near.

She feels more like prey than predator, more shark than fishermen, even when Weiss reaches over in an instant to curl a hand around Yang’s arm. Blake wonders for a flash of a second what it’s like to take a right hook to the jaw from a metal hand. Maybe if Yang clocks her, Lionheart won’t make her go to these dinners anymore.

“Do you wish you had waited to give your boyfriend time to say goodbye, or do you think it was kinder to kill him in cold blood?” Yang snaps, cruelty dripping from every snarled syllable. Blake wishes she’d just hit her.

The room erupts into a mild sort of cacophony. Lionheart begins stammering a curious mixture of apologies for his victor and accusations at Yang, while Weiss stands and launches into shrieking counterattacks about hospitality. 

Tukson looks uncertain, his knuckles resting on the silk of the tablecloth as if prepared to stand.

But Blake only grimaces, reaching for the ring on the chain around her neck.

“Neither,” she says softly, half mindful of hidden microphones in the room, half indifferent. 

If she leaves now, she can catch the final dip of the sun below the horizon, and watch the last of the fishing boats dock for the day at the pier. When the smaller ones are tied together, hundreds of vessels rise and fall in unison with the waves, like a giant floating mat of wooden algae.

She meets Yang’s eyes as she stands to leave, in one last glance. 

”I should’ve killed him the day we met.”

*

When Blake meets Adam for the first time, he’s all charm and smiles and perfect calm. She’s barely seven years old, and it’s her first day in the community home she’s brought to after her parents drown. 

She tries to be a shadow at first, hiding in the spaces between peeling walls and threadbare, moth-eaten furniture. It’s hard to reach for bravery when your family is dead. 

He finds her under a table in the beginning. It’s almost enough to coax a smile from her lips when he tries to tuck his shoulders back to fit, a tangle of lanky limbs crawling in to join her.

Adam tells her his parents are gone, too. He’s been here much longer than she has — since he was five years old, he says. 

"It's the worst place in the world,” he informs her when she asks, almost comically serious. But his face breaks out into the kind of grin that makes her want to start collecting them, a charming smile that starts to chase away the ache in her heart, raw and throbbing. “But maybe it won’t be so bad, now that you’re here.”

That’s all it takes, in that easy way of childhood. They’re friends for life. 

Adam’s eleven, just turned. He’s tall, already towering over the other boys his age and a few of the older ones. It leaves him awkward and graceless, uncoordinated and unsteady in a body that’s always changing. For a while, it’s something that keeps them on the same footing — she might be younger, smaller, but Adam’s always struggling to find his balance. 

Neither of them are old enough to have their names in the reaping bowl yet, but a few dozen abandoned and orphaned children crammed into a dilapidated building prove to be their own sort of bloodbath. 

Adam keeps the boys from tugging on her dark hair and pinching at her clothes. He’s there to keep their hands away, whether they’re trying to push her into the ground or pull her into empty rooms, alone and vulnerable. When they tease her for her eyes, golden and gleaming, he’ll cross the room to take a swipe.

When school starts at summer’s end, he shows up to walk her home with black eyes and bloody noses. She learns how to clean the blood from his face without getting it on their clothes, learns which taps run the coldest water to press soaked rags against his bruises. 

(She has to handle the other girls herself. “I won’t hit a girl,” he insists, gallant to his core.)

The fights make her feel like she owes him for something. It never occurs to her that he might like the way it feels to win. It never occurs to her that he might start them on purpose.

When she’s nine, they take a different way home. Adam leads her into a small clearing behind a cluster of the kind of dry, waxy trees that do well in the harsh soil in this part of District 4. 

He brushes away a layer of sand and dirt from under one of them to reveal a thatched lid beneath. He pulls it up, and tosses it aside.

Below, a clumsy pit is carved two feet into the hard, salty earth. It’s not filled with much, just a collection of mostly empty, woven sacks, a chunk of scrap metal, a wooden tinderbox, and a small, brutally dented pot.

But he’s proud of it. He flashes her another crooked smile, and she flushes in response. Another one for the collection.

She’s too young to be thinking about boys, but he’s beautiful to her. Clear blue eyes, dazzling and bright and unusual for Four, a contrast to its typical shades of green. His lazy curls are growing out, forming a pinioned halo of auburn on his head. It brushes lightly against ears tipped in their own shade of red from the heat of sun above them. 

He makes them rice he pours from one of the bags in his makeshift treasure chest. It’s not anything special, sticky and bland, but it’s more than she’s used to; in the community home, no one gets enough to eat. Even with Adam slipping her his pieces of the salty, fish-shaped rolls they get at meals, hunger still persists as a constant presence, a dull ache always in the back of her mind. She’s full now, though, a novel, welcome feeling, and she’s giddy with it.

The day is good enough that she forgets it’s the first time she catches him stealing. The first time she learns he has secrets to share with her at all.

Adam loses his gracelessness when he’s a little older. He hasn’t stopped growing, but he finally gets the upper hand on each new inch. He’s pulled from his job at the shipyards scraping barnacles when they take note of his size, and the new hours he works after school hauling heavy nets of catch start to pack muscle onto a once-skinny frame. His voice starts to crack, hinting at a deeper, smoother timber.

He’s changing in different ways, too. Adam’s angrier than he used to be. The district takes his wages, given back to the home to earn his keep. She learns how to calm him down every month, when he has to hand over his meager earnings from the kind of job dangerous enough to have taken both of their parents. She knows he fights with his shipmates, too, grown men larger, stronger, older than he is, who mock his inexperience and push him into the most humiliating parts of working the fishing ships. 

She learns to hold his head in her small hands, learns to card her fingers through his hair until his breathing slows. 

His fingers are quicker now, eager to skim whatever he can from the top and take back some of what he thinks he’s owed. A flashlight here, a radio there. Whatever he can pawn back later for crumbs in the lean-to markets set up in the mornings every day by the docks.

(He comes home one night, drenched in sweat and seawater and the sour, salty stench of fish, he peels off his thick jacket and takes off his shirt to reveal a fat, smuggled cod tied to his chest. He laughs at her flustered face, and pulls her through the door to enjoy the feast offered by his filching.)

She finds a knife in the dusty hatch eventually. It’s a long, thin blade. The kind they use to cut and clean catches in the processing buildings, where lines and lines of workers carve the flesh from fish to stack on ice and send to the Capitol. Adam always jokes that they’re too careful to remove each and every delicate bone. Wouldn’t it be better to let them choke?

He tells her it’s not a weapon, and she makes him promise not to use it as one. 

The penalty for thievery in any district can be death depending on the Peacekeeper who catches you. She worries for him — he’s all she has. He knows both truths well, and treats each with a frustrating amount of flippancy.

When he turns fourteen, he’s taller than most men. There’s a certain amount of power that comes from his stature and strength, and he seems to revel in it for the first time, a new swagger to his gait. 

He’s winning almost all of his fights. 

In the winter, a species of saltwater fish they haven’t figured out how to farm yet makes a migration south. The district pulls some of the older boys out of school to help with the harvest every year, and it keeps them out late into the night.

She’s waiting for him in the coarse, wide blades of grass that sprout in the place where the earth tries to strike a compromise with the sand, a couple dozen yards from the beach. The sun set hours ago, and Adam’s due back from his shift. 

She can see him climb out of the rowboat he and two other members of his crew take from the longliner back to shore. It rocks gently as he pulls himself up and onto the dock with practiced ease. 

Blake can’t hear them well from here, over the sounds of the waves crashing against the beach. She’s too far to listen to the details of the argument that erupts between the three figures below. She can’t make out the words, but she can at least feel the way the hairs on the back of her neck start to stand at attention, at the way their voices rise and change into something that charges the air with danger. 

The two other men from the boat descend on Adam.

She’ll barely come up to any of their chests, but she jumps up anyway. And then she’s running, small bare feet slapping against the worn wood of the pier, until her soles are wet with warm blood and tepid seawater. 

The men aren’t dead, but they’re something close to it. Adam’s blue eyes are hazy with a blow she saw him take to the temple, and his hand flexes to drop the knife she didn’t know he was holding, didn’t know he’d taken, as he falls to his knees. 

Blake catches the rest of him from falling, too, holding him up with all her strength, but his eyes are closing now, and she can’t help but start to scream.

She screams for help until it comes, until she’s picked up by a pair of strong arms in white. She screams over the hard crack of Adam’s head as the second Peacekeeper slams it against the dock. And she screams over the voices in her head, the ones that tell her she’s lost him forever as they pull them both apart. 

***

The Capitol has a way of chewing you up and spitting you out into something new, and she learns the way it’s changed Yang when she meets her for the second time.

They’re both halfway through the second Games Yang spends as a mentor. Both of her tributes are dead, and so are Blake’s. This year’s tributes have been whittled down to the Final Eight, and there’s not much left to do but see how much the burn of alcohol can wash away the memory of the children they’d failed.

The burn of alcohol and the company of women, Blake amends, watching Yang in a corner booth from her seat at the bar. 

Yang’s made a reputation for herself in the brief time she’s been in the Capitol. She’s become a bit of a casanova among her fellow victors, earning her a near-permanent space in gossip columns and celebrity news shows obsessed with her escapades. 

To her own consternation, there isn’t much Blake forgets about Yang Xiao Long, tabloid timelines included. First, it had been Pyrrha Nikos of District 1, then Neo Politan from District 8. Then her own District 12 escort, Weiss Schnee. After Weiss, then Pyrrha again. 

(Six months ago, it had been all three, a star-studded, show-stealing distraction on a Victory Tour in the winter.)

Blake’s never been approached by her before, at least. Small blessings.

Tonight, Weiss is in her lap again, hands low on her waist, and Blake’s grateful for the distance between them. There are camera flashes going off often enough to turn a sleepy bar briefly to a strobing club, Capitol photographers eager to capture every angle of the former heiress to the diamond mines of District 1 glued at the lips to the scruffy, scrappy underdog from District 12.

When Yang manages to finally peel herself from her partner, she shifts out of her seat and moves to the counter to get the bartender’s attention. 

“Can I get a Strawberry Sunrise, and a Catnip Sip for Weiss?” she says, leaning forward on both arms against the bar. And then, an afterthought: “Oh! And don’t forget the little umbrella.”

She doesn’t pay in places like this — none of the victors do. It’s good business to have victors as your customers. All the better if they end up in the tabloids with your drinks in their hands and your watering hole in the background of the shot. 

“Hey, Four,” she nods at Blake, and the corners of her mouth can’t decide if they want to twitch up or down at the remark.

“I didn’t know that I’d graduated from ‘psychopath’ to ‘Four,’” Blake says. “You should’ve sent flowers.”

A brief grin flashes across Yang’s face before contorting into an expression of feigned remorse. “I know, I’m sorry. I lost track of time setting fire to all your pictures,” she admits. 

Blake _does_ smile now, mind made up. “Implying you have any?”

Yang’s eyes gleam, and she gives a shrug of her shoulders as she takes a seat on the stool next to Blake. “Weiss sends me copies of all the magazines I end up in. It’s not my fault the editors are all lazy enough to include a couple shots of you.”

Blake makes an exaggerated ‘o’ of understanding, and she nods once in humble ascension. “Of course. I didn’t mean to assume.”

“It’s no trouble,” Yang replies graciously. 

Blake’s eyes flick towards the girl Yang’s left alone in the corner, tapping away at her scroll. In truth, she’d been more surprised than offended by Yang in District 4. It’s unusual for people to be bold enough to bring up Adam’s death in front of her, a dark history pulled out into the open, raw and exposed. She knows what it’s like to be a victor, newly crowned, testing the length of your leash. 

She takes another drink from her glass before looking back up at Yang, who’s still looking at her with something like interest, open desire clear in her lilac eyes. “So what’s the reason for the change in attitude? Has your escort finally warmed you up to the idea of mixing with Careers?”

She’s gleaned the details of the history of the Schnees in the few years since meeting the youngest daughter. All three of Jacques’s children have trained as Careers for their district, while none have made it to the arena so far. The eldest defected in her last year to climb the ranks of the Capitol’s security forces in District; Weiss’s trial to earn her spot to volunteer had ended in a permanent scar across her eye when she was seventeen. 

Blake didn’t know if her father kept her from disappearing it as a reminder of her failure, or if it was a choice she made herself.

(The doctors had cleared Blake’s skin of all its imperfections before she’d even woken up from the arena. The largest of which, a deep, gaping gouge on her abdomen, had been cleanly sewn, then scrubbed away with typical Capitol magic. Where there should be a jagged line above her hip, only new, smooth skin remains.)

Now, the middle Schnee spends her time exiled to the district at the very edges of Panem.

When Yang follows Blake’s gaze back to her escort, she lets out a burst of laughter, endearingly loud, like she can’t contain it. 

“Do I need to send some champagne to the table, for the happy couple?” Blake adds in a drawl, raising a single eyebrow.

“For me and Weiss? Don’t waste your bubbles. We’re not anything,” she says. She nods in thanks as the bartender sets two glasses down in front of her. “Besides, I don’t think Weiss is capable of warming anyone up.”

It’s not Blake’s fault for staring when Yang wraps her full, kissed lips around the slim straw of the bright pink drink. It’s not her fault if she feels a flush of heat from somewhere below her sternum for the first time in a long time. 

“That was an awful lot of tongue for two people who aren’t anything,” she remarks, and Yang manages to swallow her drink before laughing again.

“Weiss hates her dad, and her old man hates me,” Yang explains. “Well, he hates anyone who isn’t Capitol or One, really, and even then, it’s a flip of a coin.” She pauses, shaking her head. “Shit, it’s even a toss-up with his own family. Who would I be to deny her a chance to make a king squirm?”

“And what do you get out of it? The knowledge of a job well done, a rich man gently inconvenienced?” Blake asks.

“No,” says Yang, voice lowering and head ducking closer to meet her, in a familiar enough habit shared in the Capitol between its outsiders that Blake leans forward to accommodate her automatically. It’s a conversation not meant for the eyes and ears around them. “The more I end up in the papers with girl drama, the less they care about my family.”

“Your family?” she says, surprised. Yang had been tight-lipped in her interviews with Clover before her Games. He’d managed to extract a disaffected mention of a half-sister, a father, and an uncle, but nothing about her delivery ever betrayed a hidden affection, nor loyalty. 

“My sister, mostly,” she admits. “There was a piece about her when I came home from my Victory Tour, some exposé. Nothing in it worth a damn, since she knew to keep quiet. But I’ve tried to raise a little hell ever since to keep attention off of her.”

She takes another sip of her drink through her straw. “They’re easily distracted by something shiny,” she finishes, punctuated with a wink.

Yang’s not the most popular victor, nor the most desired one the Capitol was strange about that, she thinks. All the alterations they willingly made to their bodies in the name of fashion and sex — colors and ink and metal and fur — and the traits that were still the least desirable were the ones you were either born with, or the ones you had no choice in getting.

Yang’s prosthetic arm isn’t a fashion piece, nor even a badge of honor in the city. Instead, it’s an aberration. But she’s captivating enough. She’s gorgeous, undeniably so, as well as gregarious, powerful, dangerous. A missing limb can’t get in the way of the sheer force of nature that Yang presents, both beauty and beast.

“I thought you weren’t close with your sister,” Blake asks. 

“Ruby? No, no. We’re close. I practically raised her” Yang says, eyes sparking with affection. “She’s mine.” It’s the kind of confession she’s not entirely sure Yang means to make, but maybe she feels guilty, feels like she owes her something after her outburst on the Victory Tour in District 4.

Or maybe it’s that Blake just lost her last tribute an hour ago and is licking her wounds here alone. She gave an interview before she left the Tribute Center about what went wrong a little more than an hour ago. It’s hard to tell them what she could’ve done to keep children barely a year younger than she is now alive again, for the fifth time. 

There are only a couple dozen souls alive who can understand what it’s like to come back from the Hunger Games, who understand what it’s like to come back as a mentor. It’s hard not to seek each other out, to find comfort in mutual experience. 

It doesn’t matter, either way, because she enjoys the way that Yang seems to come a little more alive — no, that’s not right, a little more comfortable, a little looser, a little more real — at the mention of her sister.

She’s grateful for it. Yang’s wild gesticulations shrink to suit her hushed tone, smaller in size, but they’re no less fierce in their energy, and her infectious enthusiasm is more of a pick-me-up than the drink Blake’s nursing.

“That’s the one good thing about the money,” Yang admits, on the tail end of gushing about Ruby’s prowess as an inventor, an engineer, unusual for a girl from Twelve instead of Three. “Before, we couldn’t afford anything that we didn’t strictly need. It was hard to waste money on a soldering kit. I remember pulling her out of people’s trash cans when she was younger, looting around for their metal and plastics, anything she could try to melt down and wire together in her room.”

“Isn’t your talent supposed to be metalworking?” Blake questions, glancing at the intricate bracelet on Yang’s left wrist, peeking out of the brown leather cuff of her jacket. It’s beautiful in its own right, graceful in the way the pieces fit together, even unpainted. She’d shown it off as a decorative piece at the start of these Games as evidence of the hobby she’d taken up after her victory. 

Since when does she pay enough attention to Yang to remember what she does in her spare time?

Yang grins, holding up her palm. “It’s Ruby’s,” she says, and when she brings her third finger down to meet her thumb, the bracelet transforms, unwrapping in a delicate, complicated dance of gears and plates that unravel up and over the skin of her hand. When it’s finished, it coats Yang’s entire fist in a metal glove that stops just above her first knuckles. 

“Shit,” Blake says, impressed, and Yang repeats the gesture; the bracelet folds back and over itself into its smaller form.

“She didn’t want me cutting my knuckles open again, just in case I start any fistfights,” she says. “Considering it didn’t go so well last time.”

“That’s handy,” Blake offers, and hides her pleased smile at Yang’s double-take behind her glass. “But it’s a little bare, don’t you think? You should paint it.”

“Yeah? What color are you thinking?”

“Yellow,” she says decisively. “Definitely.” 

“I’ll talk it over with my armorer as soon as I see her,” she promises. 

Yang plucks the umbrella out of her empty drink, twirling it absently between her fingers. Her focus is reserved for Blake instead, staring with an attentive gaze that sends an unexpected thrill through her. “So what about you, Four?” Yang asks. “You got any family squirreled away?”

Blake shakes her head. “Dead parents; no siblings,” she clips, then rushes to clarify when Yang’s face softens in sympathy. “You don’t have to apologize. It’s been a long time.” 

“Okay, okay,” she relents, before perking back up. “But you must have someone here, at least. A boyfriend.” 

Blake shakes her head. 

“Girlfriend..?” 

There’s a hopeful lilt to Yang’s tone, and Blake’s lips turn up in amusement before repeating the gesture. “No girlfriend.”

“Come on. There must be someone in this city who’s caught your eye,” Yang says in disbelief. “I know most of them are insufferable, but there’s always at least one diamond in the rough.”

“No,” Blake says, one hand reaching up to find the chain around her neck. “It’s not like that.” 

And it’s not. The pictures they take of Blake Belladonna are all of her alone, the articles only recycled versions of the same sordid story. She’s careful to keep the Capitol from losing interest in the role she plays for them. “They like to keep me heartbroken,” she says.

“Well, that’s a shame,” says Yang, after a beat or two, comprehension and a flash of disappointment flicking across her face in sequence. She offers another smile instead, wry and flirtatious. “I was going to ask you to dance.”

“I guess you’ll need to find another girl to make a scandal with, this time,” she counters. 

The Capitol’s favorite underdog leans back on her stool before standing to leave, Weiss’s drink in her hands. 

“‘Guess so. See you around, Four,” she says, striding back to her corner booth. 

Blake can’t help but laugh when she hears Weiss scream about her melted ice.

#### ***

The Capitol rewards her for her victory with the kind of fortune that would’ve made Adam’s head spin. It’s generous enough to mean she no longer has to attend school, no longer has to work, no longer has to belong to her community at all.

In most districts, it would isolate her. If you keep your child killers in opulence and reward them for their service, it’s enough to turn most of their own people against them. Though the reapings disproportionately sample from the poor and desperate, the wealthier classes can find the Games just as distasteful. There’s always a chance your child will be taken, as long as they were born outside of the Capitol.

Career districts are a little different. Not everyone welcomes their victors with open arms, but they’re begrudgingly accepted at the very least.

It means Blake’s allowed more freedom than those unlucky enough to win in a district that doesn’t have a culture of raising their tributes, and that’s at least something to be grateful for. 

The Victor’s Village is tucked inland, away from the beaches that adorn almost every mile of Four’s expansive coastline. The Capitol planners must’ve thought it generous to base it away from the water; the ocean represents a way of life in District 4 that’s dominated by hard labor and human sacrifice to the insatiable beast of industry.

But the ocean has always been the one constant in her life, and its absence rubs salt in the raw, aching hole in her heart she has from the Games when she first moves into the Village. For as much as it’s taken from her, the push and pull of its tides have never changed. A single constant in a lifetime of upheaval. 

So she finds the sea again, and it welcomes her home.

An olive-skinned girl with red hair so dark it’s nearly brown teaches her how to freedive. Ilia’s patient with her, but she’s haughty, too, and the juxtaposition coaxes real laughter from her throat for the first time since coming back from the Capitol. Blake learns how to fish on the ocean floor, how to follow the floating lines of rope with one hand and pluck crustaceans from the sand with the other. It feels good to be useful again, to spend her days feeding Panem instead of training to kill its children.

She’s never appreciated the silence of the ocean before. The way that sound travels with a whimper underwater, petering out to a sweet nothing within a few feet, tempered into quiet under the weight of thousands and thousands of gallons of saltwater. 

A year after the 68th Hunger Games, there’s a sweltering summer that arrives several weeks too early, bringing a series of particularly brutal storms along with it. They’re the kinds of hurricanes that tend to raze the earth, the ones that do their best to return the land to entropy after the citizens of District 4 have wrestled it to order. 

Blake goes to bring Ilia to the Victor’s Village before the first of the hurricanes hits. She’s from the community home, too, and Blake isn’t cruel enough to leave her there. She remembers how suffocating it felt to spend hours, even days, in the storm shelters underground, sweat and heat seeping from the dozens of other children around her, packed in like sardines.

There’s nothing that could knock her house down — it’s made of white marble, brick and stone, the kinds of materials you need to withstand District 4’s wide range of natural disasters. But the girls find their way to the basement anyway. Old habits are hard to shake.

The power cuts off about an hour in.

But Blake’s strangely, oddly happy when she treks upstairs to bring back down the luxuries in her oversized refrigerator, the ones that will spoil if they aren’t put to use in the heat. 

Full cuts of salmon. Fresh vegetables imported from District 11. She smiles a true smile, watching Ilia scoop her finger in a carton of melting ice cream rescued from her freezer, a rare treat, courtesy of District 10.

Despite all the Capitol’s engineering, District 4 is still the only place that lemon trees will grow, the only place where you can coax fruit to follow the flowers. They’re illegal to pick from — the pickers for the harvests are followed by Peacekeepers on every shift. It’s illegal to even scrounge for the half-rotten fruit that fall to the dirt, even on the trees outside of the orchards. 

Blake tosses Ilia a lemon after she’s polished off the pint of chocolate ice cream. She tells her to roll it between her palms. It softens the fruit inside, coaxes out the juice from the fibers that make up the wedges beneath the waxy skin.

Their hands loosen the oil from the peel, and the sweet, fragrant scent of citrus seeps into their skin. They press their palms into their noses and inhale like fools. 

In District 4, you can’t get the smell of fish off of you if you work on the boats or in the factories. It clings to your clothes, sits in your hair, lurks under your fingernails, sour, salty, rotting. You learn to forget it’s there with time, but it’s rare that there’s something this lovely to fill the space instead.

Ilia’s nice, and sweet, and pretty, and they share enough tragedy between them to fill her basement, agony enough to match the temper of the storms that blow outside. Blake asks her how many slips of paper her name is written on for the reaping next month. Just fifteen, she says. Her brother died last year, and she doesn’t have to take out tesserae for him anymore. 

Small blessings, Blake thinks.

When Ilia asks about the Games, Blake answers. She tells her about Adam, clutching the chain of the necklace around her neck in one hand and threading through Ilia’s fingers with the other.

She tells her how she learned to make herself small with him, and doesn’t know how to forget. Tells her of how it felt to be a bug under a microscope in the Capitol, in the arena, how it felt to know that everyone in the world was watching for the worst moments of her life.

When Ilia asks the question Clover Ebi didn’t, she gives an honest answer. And maybe she looks entirely too much like the broken creature she is, in a way that tugs at Ilia’s pity, but she presses her lips against Blake’s all the same.

It’s nice.

They both smell like lemon. 

-

#### ***

Yang shows her hand to Panem eventually, though it’s more that her cards are taken from her and slapped down face-up on the table before the river’s even pulled.

All the power and wealth and calculated misdirection in the world can’t help Ruby’s name from being pulled from the reaping bowl three years after Yang’s Games.

Blake’s tributes, reaped this morning, are already being groomed and inspected by their stylists under the oversight of their escort on the other side of the train. She’s left alone with Tukson to study their competition as they’re chosen, before they arrive in the Capitol. District 12 is the only drawing left. 

The footage is broadcast live. It takes up an entire wall of the train compartment.

So it’s easy to see the way Weiss’s face is paler than its already ghostly pallor, the way her hand trembles ever so slightly as she reaches her hand into the drawing bowl.

Blake almost forgets she’s not alone when Yang’s sister’s name falls from Weiss’s lips in a quiet, wooden tone, but it’s more the way the camera jumps to District 12’s only winner that has her nearly gasping.

An expression of pure anguish shatters across Yang’s face. It breaks into jagged lines of despair, mouth opened in a choked, silent scream, terror catching in her throat.

Another few heartbeats, and then Yang _is_ screaming, and moving, too. She jumps cleanly off of the raised stage to crash bodily into a remarkably stoic-looking Ruby, whose arms wrap automatically around her sister’s neck, hands fisting in her collar. Only her eyes are visible to the camera that follows them, unblinking, steely silver, the rest of her face tucked into Yang’s shoulder.

The Peacekeepers come to pull them apart in seconds. Yang spins to tucks Ruby behind her, using her body to shield her sister. Her eyes are blazing, fierce and hot, and Blake almost misses it when Yang’s third finger touches her thumb, painted yellow metal unravelling to cover her hand.

Blake _does_ gasp, then, when Yang lashes out at the face of the first white uniform that reaches them, his gloved hand outstretched and threatening. She sees her fist fly, and then—

The screen jumps back to the stage in an artless cut, but the editors are too slow to muffle the sounds of the melee in the crowd. There’s a slap of what Blake realizes with a wince is the familiar sound of a baton striking bare flesh, followed by another, and another. It’s all set to the overlay of screaming, with Ruby’s voice now joining in with her sister’s, pleading for it all to stop.

Blake can’t make out whether she’s begging Yang, or the men surrounding them. 

The audio stream is replaced by a flustered pair of Capitol commentators, and Blake reaches for the button to mute their nervous chatter before turning her gaze to Tukson.

His face is solemn. Tukson has a wife and three daughters — she knows he’s thinking about Yang’s reaction with his family in mind. None of his girls are old enough to face the reapings in District 4 yet, but she can’t help but think about what his response would be if any of them were taken.

There are always a few family members that break down during the drawings. It’s something the Capitol loves to show. But the Hunger Games are a reminder of how powerless the districts are to stop their children, their brothers and sisters, from being stolen away. 

For all of the screaming and crying, for every parent, sibling, friend clinging fiercely to their sacrificial lambs, white uniforms coaxing them apart with words and weapons, Blake can’t remember seeing anyone fight back. 

“She hit a Peacekeeper on camera,” she marvels. 

Tukson rubs at his face with one hand, watching through his fingers as a stunned-looking Weiss calls the male tribute up to the stage. He’s from the small group of thirteen-year-olds, a short, skinny boy called Oscar Pine. 

When Weiss asks for the customary applause, no one in the crowd reacts for a long time. Their hands are held firmly at their sides, before a shift occurs. At first, one, then another, and then almost every member of the crowd touches the three middle fingers of their left hand to their lips and holds it out to the tributes on the stage.

She has no idea what it means, and glances again at Tukson for an explanation.

“Something tells me that we won’t have the tributes from District 12 for very long this year,” is all he says.

*

Adam isn’t arrested, or killed. Not anywhere close. 

Instead, he’s moved from the community home to the barracks of the enclave where they train children to kill. It’s an open secret of a compound on the outer edges of a town four hours on foot from her. 

Apparently, the justice system of District 4 places more value in Adam’s skill as a fighter than it does in any sort of punishment. 

Let him repent in the arena, they say. Let him pay back his debt by bringing home honor and glory as a victor for District 4. 

They’re not apart for very long. Barely two months pass before she climbs out of the car they send for her to stand in front of the place where Careers are made.

He’s pulled some strings, Adam tells her, as he lifts her completely off the ground, after rushing through the front doors to greet her. 

Adam’s still just fourteen, but he’s managed to climb the ranks at a pace unmatched by any of his peers, taking to the art of war with a prodigal sort of ruthlessness.

District 4 hasn’t had a winner in the ten years since Tukson won the 55th Games, one of the longest dry spells for a Career district anyone can remember. It’s clear that they’re betting on Adam to change their luck, with such devotion that they’ll humor him in rescuing a tiny shadow of a girl like Blake from her place in the community home.

“Don’t worry,” he promises her, when she realizes where she is and what she’ll be asked to do, golden eyes widening in terror. She hasn’t even been to her first reaping yet. “It won’t be you. No one’s going to look at you and see a victor.”

There’s a grueling amount of training to be done. Drills and diets and deadly dances with double-edged swords, meant to hone her strength and speed. The hunger pangs that used to scrape painfully at the walls of her stomach are replaced by the burn of muscles overtaxed, of aching feet and throbbing bruises. 

She learns how to throw knives and shurikens with precision, tips embedded in the center of target rings in groups packed so close together that it’s a struggle to pull them from the soft wood. Her archery isn’t half-bad, either, but there’s only one bow light enough for her to hold for more than a couple seconds at a time. Her trainers tell her that she’ll grow into them in a few years.

Blake learns to wield a sword early, for no other reason than necessity. The other girls seem intent to make her yield in their duels as roughly as possible. It’s an aggression that’s isolating as much as it is confusing. 

She realizes the source of their ire eventually, and she can hardly blame them. They’re all in love with Adam, and he still spends the majority of his free time and attention the way he has since he was eleven — alone with Blake.

He’s fifteen now, shoulders wide and square from hundreds of hours training with every kind of blade, though he’s partial to a single-edged longsword, one that Blake can hardly lift with two arms, much less Adam’s preferred, almost casual grip with one. 

Neither one of them really had much baby fat to begin with, but the last of Adam’s has all but disappeared from his face, carving out a strong, sharp jaw to contrast with a delicate, almost feminine mouth. His striking blue eyes stay just slightly too big, bright and boyish, a charming clash of youth and maturity that proves irresistible. 

He’s not blind to their affections. There are other girls, at first. It’s not enough to bother her until she’s a little older. The mild annoyance at the way his flings start to eat into their time together turns into something darker and sharper with age. Only then does it start to sting at her heart. 

When the jealousy is enough to bubble up in her throat and snap at him for it, he laughs, and lifts a finger to tilt her chin up and make her meet his gaze.

She’s thirteen, and he’s three months past his sixteenth birthday. She’s caught up with him, just a little. There’s a little more meat on her bones, the start of a swell to her chest. They let her grow her hair past her shoulders here, thick, wavy curls of shining black trailing down just above her breasts. 

His voice doesn’t crack anymore. It’s deeper, smoother, warmer, and it sends a thrill through her when he speaks, coupled now with the electricity that thrums from where his fingers cup her face. 

“I won’t fool around with the other girls if you don’t want me to, my love,” he says, before kissing her for the first time. “There’s no competition.”

It’s only in the last year or so before his Games that they start to fight together. She’s finally strong enough to hold her own beside him. They fit together almost perfectly, she thinks, in almost every way. 

He works in close combat, straightforward, efficient, ruthless, while she takes the longer range, distracting and drawing out his opponents with the acrobatics she’s taken a shine to, lithe and fluid and fast. 

Adam teases once that they’d be unstoppable together, if they were reaped in the same year. He hums with laughter when she asks him who would win.

“You would, of course,” he promises. “I’d die for you.”

He does.

#### ***

District 4’s always been just a touch more seditious than has ever been good for them. As far as Blake can tell, it’s not because they’re treated any worse than the other districts. It’s not dissent born of excessive force (though all their force is excessive), or crippling poverty — not when almost all the districts are poor.

No, none of that; the ocean lives inside of the people of District 4, and the ocean can’t be controlled. 

It’s not often, but mutinies do occur against the handful of Peacekeepers placed on the larger rigs out on the water, the power balance shifted. There are only so many bullets they can fire from their guns before the click of an empty chamber echoes back.

But all waves break against the shore eventually. The Capitol may not boast a navy, but they still have an army. The insurrections that happen out on the water are quashed on land, just like everywhere else.

If the rebels are brought back alive, when it’s all over, they’re lined up to kneel along the steps of the town square. It doesn’t matter which town — it’s filmed and screened across the district in a mandatory viewing, the same as the Hunger Games. A firing squad isn’t dramatic enough. The only thing that builds the fear right is a single marksman, moving down the line, stacking fear with every pull of the trigger.

But if injury has to be done to a man, a movement, it should be so severe that there’s no chance of vengeance left. So they’ll pick someone completely innocent from the crowd. The victims are usually as frail and helpless as possible. Children, the elderly, the disabled. Dragged into the center of the square to be punished for the actions of the few. 

They don’t usually kill them. All the training they get in District 2 is usually good enough to teach them restraint, precise enough to leave them alive.

But the Peacekeepers will take slow, deliberate turns with savage strikes of their batons. They pause between each hit, to leave room for each to echo through the stunned silence of the crowd. A single word or gesture of protest from any of them to stop only results in being dragged out and beaten, too.

That bleeding heart had almost been Blake, once, before Adam had tightened his grip on her arm to counter the automatic flex of her muscle. 

Adam had been eager to play the Games for a taste of power. But what he’d really played for was the privilege of being welcomed into the Capitol as at best a guest, and at worst as its pet. 

It’s not power, Blake thinks, taking in the sight of Yang Xiao Long’s limp body being dragged through the doors of the mentor’s lounge by a pair of Peacekeepers, white arms each taking a shoulder. She’s thrown roughly to the floor, and each of the men behind her raise their heads, unreadable behind their helmets, but the challenge is easy enough to gleam.

 _Try it,_ they say, in a room full of victors, just like Yang. She’s on the ground now, knuckles braced against the floor. She spits, and it’s a darker color than it should be, like there’s blood in her mouth, stark enough even in the low lighting of the room. But Blake is more alarmed by the way she seems to struggle to breathe than anything else, chest heaving and stuttering.

The Peacekeepers turn around and leave.

Adam’s not here now. Before she really knows what she’s doing, she’s out of her seat, sliding on her knees next to Yang. There are eyes of the other victors on them, wide and quiet, but hers are only for the girl in front of her.

They’ve made an example out of her, she thinks. Evidence of her sister’s reaping is painted across her left cheekbone with a heavy stroke of deep purple, dark and deep with color after the hours since the strike. When Yang lifts her head in response, Blake can see the way the bruise trails into her eye, broken vessels seeping red into the white of her cornea, blood pooling around her iris.

“Should I get Weiss?” Blake asks.

Yang’s eyes widen in fear, and she winces again as it pulls at the skin around her eye. “No,” she pants, hissing through her teeth. “No, Ruby will see.”

The real marks are the ones Blake knows are hidden beneath Yang’s heavy jacket, the ones that have Yang in so much pain that she struggles not to gasp through each breath, like each expansion of her lungs against her ribs is a burden.

No, Blake thinks. You don’t get to talk back to Peacekeepers. You don’t get to question them. And you certainly don’t get to hit them. Not in Four, not in Twelve. Not as an urchin, nor a victor.

She half-carries Yang to the elevator of the Training Center, pushing her through the sliding doors and pressing the button for the fourth floor. Thankfully, Tukson and her tributes are already asleep, but she can feel Fennec’s eyes on her from his place at the dining room table as she moves through the dark apartment. 

Her Avox materializes seemingly out of nowhere, the way they always do. Her eyes are wide and questioning as she follows them across the floor, uncertain of whether she should help Blake in carrying Yang. 

“Can you get me several bags of ice?” Blake murmurs, before she stumbles through the door of her bathroom, pushing it shut behind her with one foot. 

Yang’s almost entirely dead weight now, and she struggles to sit her down at the edge of her bathtub. Her fingers have been clutching Blake’s clothing to keep from slipping out of her hold, and it’s hard to pry them from the fabric. 

“Hey, stay awake,” she says when she sees Yang’s closed eyes, voice pitching up in panic at the possibility of a concussion. “Did they hit your head?” she says, slipping her hands into Yang’s hair to feel for a damp press of blood, a swollen raise of her skin.

Yang’s eyes blink back open at the contact, pulling away from Blake’s hand with irritation. Her pupils are dilated with pain and adrenaline, but they constrict normally under the bright white of the room. “No,” she says, strained and shallow. “I’m just tired and in pain. They know better than to leave me with any more brain damage than I already have.”

It’s true that whatever hurt the Capitol’s inflicted, most of it will be easily hidden. The mark on her cheek is public enough. The rest is personal, a private reminder to fall in line just for Yang.

Blake pushes the heavy coat from her shoulders with little protest. The rich, worn leather is split and scuffed, and she tosses it over the rim of the sink. 

She has Yang lift her arms to help her pull her white shirt off. The mottled mosaic of reds, blacks, and blues blooming across the entirety of Yang’s torso steals the breath from Blake’s lungs, her own skin almost aching in sympathy. 

“What happened?” she asks, almost dumbstruck, and she almost reaches out to touch her skin before stopping herself, moving down to Yang feet. 

“Oh, nothing,” Yang answers, watching as Blake’s fingers move to start undoing the laces of her boots. She winces when she raises her leg gently to pull them off, the flexion straining the skin of her abdomen. “President Salem wanted me to teach a couple of her best guys some of my moves.” 

“I thought your signature move was your uppercut, not getting crushed under a building.”

“I have a diverse array of skills.” The deadpan’s not as smooth as it should be. Yang’s breathing is starting to make her speech labored, slow.

The Avox comes in, holding an almost comically large bag of ice in each hand. Her dark eyes widen at Yang’s exposed top, be it from its musculature or injury, before dropping the ice and rushing back out. 

“Shy, isn’t she?” Yang notes.

“Why shouldn’t she be?” Blake asks absently, pulling off her other boot. She’s lost for a moment in how natural this feels. How much like gravity it was to fall to her knees for Yang, like they’ve done this before. Not the undressing — though that feels impossibly familiar, too — but like she’s been here with Yang before, after a fight. Like protecting her is part of her DNA.

“You’d think she’d be used to being around pretty girls by now,” Yang grins.

Blake feels her skin flush, and keeps her face down as she strips her of her pants to reveal the thin black shorts underneath.

“Maybe they _should’ve_ hit your head,” she mutters.

Yang’s thighs aren’t much better, but at least the blows seem to be sparse enough here that Blake can make out individual strikes, wide lashes criss-crossing her thighs.

She stands up to pour half of the ice in the tub, turning on the cold tap for a moment. Yang takes the hand she offers to ease her down into it, and her skin burns strangely when she lets her fingers go. Blake flexes her fingers to shake the feeling out.

Yang hisses at the cold when her skin meets the ice and water. Her inflamed flesh almost seems to steam at the contact. She shifts slightly before nodding at Blake, and she dumps the other bag in. 

Yang starts to tie her hair up, wincing at the reach, but Blake stops her. 

“Let me,” she offers. 

Yang hesitates for a moment, searching Blake’s face for something she can’t decipher. Then, she hands her the band, twisting her head slightly to grant her better access. 

Blake starts to comb her fingers gently through the mass of golden hair to collect it. There are baby hairs curling in delicate wisps at the base of Yang’s neck that refuse to group in her hand, but she does her best to twist her hair into a high, loose bun. If she feels Yang shiver when she brushes her fingers against her skin, she chalks it up to the ice.

The one good thing about the Capitol is that they know how to build a bathroom. The tubs they had in the Career barracks were all too short, a frustrating five feet. It wasn’t a problem for Blake at first, but she remembers Adam complaining on the days she helped him ice his body after training.

The bathtub in District 4’s tribute quarters is big enough to even fit all of Yang Xiao Long, and she’s free to sink down into the water up to her neck. 

Blake takes a hand towel and submerges it in the water, grabbing a few stray pieces of ice before holding the fabric up to the bruise on Yang’s eye, clucking in sympathy when she closes it in a wince at the contact. 

“Ow,” Yang mutters. 

“I never knew you had freckles,” she says, eyes flicking at the faint dusting of spots across the strong, crooked bridge of Yang’s nose. It was charmingly misshapen before Yang’s Games, and even more so after. 

Yang hums. “The stylists usually have me cover them. They’re hard to spot if you’re not looking.”

“Speaking of looking…” she says. “Can you move your left eye for me? Is your sight obscured at all?”

Yang’s eyes blink open, and Blake’s heart thuds a little louder at the sight of gentle lilac again, even with the blood in her eye. 

Yang answers with a particularly sassy eye roll.

“Thanks, smartass,” she says before sighing. “I’m pretty sure your ribs are broken. Even if your eye’s fine, you could have internal bleeding.”

“But doctor, isn’t that where the blood’s supposed to be?” Yang murmurs to herself, sinking deeper into the water.

“I can’t just keep you on ice until you bleed out from the inside in my bathroom. We need to get you to someone who actually knows what they’re doing,” she insists, dropping the towel from Yang’s face in frustration. “But they haven’t sent you one for a reason. I don’t know who’d we go to in the middle of the night.”

“Jaune,” Yang says absently, closing her eyes again.

“Jaune?” Blake frowns in confusion at the name of the victor from District 10.

“He’s training as a healer.”

Good for him, Blake thinks. Jaune Arc had always been perfectly friendly towards her, even if he couldn’t always string a coherent sentence together when they’d spoken.

She reaches for her scroll with her free hand and pulls up his name before typing out a message. A response comes within a couple seconds, scroll buzzing repeatedly with frantic, clipped messages.

Yang smiles at the sound like it’s familiar. “He’s a good doctor when he calms down. Or so Pyrrha tells me.”

Blake presses the cloth to her cheekbone again, until something floats to the forefront of her mind. She glances down at Yang’s left wrist, bare under the water. “Where’s your bracelet?”

Yang’s right eye peeks out to stare at her curiously. “It took a couple hits in Twelve this morning. Gave it to Ruby on the train to try to fix before they picked me up again tonight.” She pauses to catch her breath again, winded from the strain of all the words against her ribs. “We painted it yellow,” she finishes.

“I noticed,” Blake says. She can feel the corners of her lips curl faintly up.

“Aren’t you not supposed to do that?” Yang asks softly, a smile flickering across her face. 

“Do what?”

“Notice me?”

The sound of her scroll ringing saves her from answering, and Yang strains to sit back up. She studies her silently while Blake answers the call, with Jaune stammering questions in her ear. 

#### **

When the storms break, Ilia leaves. There’s a shy blush high on her freckled cheeks as she steps out through Blake’s front door. It only deepens after Blake can’t help but steal another soft kiss before she goes, pressed against her door frame.. 

There’s something like light in her chest when she watches her go, like a firefly sparking to life between cupped palms on a summer night. It’s familiar, but different, too. 

She jumps slightly when she sees her former mentor sitting on her front step on the other side of the street. Sienna watches her with a neutral expression, one that doesn’t change when it’s Blake’s turn to blush. 

Sienna curls her finger. _Come here,_ it says, so she does. She’s never disobeyed an order Sienna’s given her. 

Blake follows her, crossing the street and through her door, this time down the steps of Sienna’s basement. There’s a tension she can see held in the woman’s shoulders as she follows behind her.

Sienna reaches for the electricity panel on the side of the wall and flips the breaker switch back and forth, as if daring the hum of power to return. When it doesn’t, she turns to face her. 

Soon after Sienna’s Games, she had opted to adopt some of the Capitol’s traditions. Disruptive coloration tattoos line her arms and shoulders in a darker brown than the color of her skin. 

On Capitol citizens, alterations are almost always absurd to the point of comedy, but on Sienna, the markings have always looked more threatening than anything else. 

There aren’t any tigers left in the world, but if there were, she can’t imagine them looking more intimidating than Sienna does to her now.

“What do you think you’re doing with that girl?” she asks.

“Ilia?” Blake questions. Though Sienna’s voice is a perfect calm, she finds herself shrinking automatically against the concrete wall of the basement. She curses herself for the response right after. “She’s teaching me how to dive for rockfish.”

Sienna’s face doesn’t change. She only waits for a better answer.

“I let her stay over,” Blake tries instead. “She’s from the community home in town. They’re not the most comfortable places to wait out the storms.”

Sienna nods slowly, and the silence between them stretches into a tight tension as Blake waits for her to speak.

“Do you know what President Salem does to pretty girls who win the Hunger Games?” she finally asks. Sienna has an unsettling trait of looking you directly in the eye when she’s speaking and wants to be heard, and this is no exception. Two pairs of golden eyes meet each other in lockstep.

Blake shakes her head.

“The price of maintaining her unique grip on power is almost incalculably high,” says Sienna. “Neither of us are old enough to remember a time before the Games, but my mother and father could remember a time before Salem. None have kept their hold on Panem as long as she has, even after decades of would-be usurpers vying for the throne.”

Sienna’s eyes narrow before continuing. “She trades in favors as much as she trades in fear. Where she can’t use pain, she offers pleasure instead.”

The last time Blake can remember seeing her mentor’s mask of emotion slip was when she was brought out of the sleep the doctors put her in after she won the Games. Sienna’s had been the first face she saw, sitting in a chair pulled up by her bed. It had been a face of guilt then, and it’s a face of guilt now.

“The Capitol has always loved their victors too much…” 

The implication starts as ice in her sternum before it begins a steady drip of chill through her blood. 

“What?” Blake says, stunned.

“They’ll make you comfortable, if you’re sold. They’ll give you something for the fear, the panic. The pain. Whatever you need.”

“When?” Blake whispers. 

“They start at sixteen,” she answers. The legal age of consent in Panem. Still young enough to be considered a child for the reapings. “But I’ve done my best to make sure she doesn’t touch you.”

The fear is almost enough to drown in. Blake can’t get enough air. Her legs buckle, and she slides down the wall to curl against it. 

Sienna kneels down to meet her, but her voice is no more gentle than it was before. “You’re one half of the star-crossed lovers from District Four, and the love of your life is dead. That keeps you safe, do you understand me?” she snarls. “You’re miserable. A heartbroken princess whose prince died in battle—”

 _In my battle,_ she thinks. 

“—and left her only with his ring,” Sienna says, reaching forward to grab the chain around her neck, pulling her forward and holding the circle of grey metal between her fingers. “The moment you stop being in love with Adam is the moment you become more valuable as a prize than a tragedy. No one wants sloppy seconds.”

Blake can only stare. 

“Do you get it? You can’t be in love again. You can’t be happy. Not here, not in the Capitol. You’re lucky your little date happened when the power was out, or every bug in your house would’ve given you away. The moment you stop being in love with Adam is the moment you become more valuable as a prize than a tragedy.”

“And I can’t say no?” Blake manages to ask, grasping for any out she can.

“What do you think happens to Ilia if you try?” Sienna hisses, tightening her grip. “You’re more exciting to all of them when they’re taking bets to see when you’ll throw yourself into the sea.”

Blake’s running through what her future looks like in her mind, but the walls start to close in around it in the light of the truth Sienna’s laying out for her. There’s nothing, she realizes. There’s nothing left. 

“Can’t I?” she shoots back.

“What, kill yourself?” Sienna scoffs, repulsed at the idea.

“Isn’t that the only choice? Isn’t it better than to live like this? You should’ve let me die in the arena if you knew it would be like this. You shouldn’t have picked me,” Blake spits, her voice finally starting to crack. Tears begin to build and break, rolling down her cheeks.

Sienna’s quiet for a long moment. And then, for the first time Blake can remember, she breaks eye contact first. Her gaze flicks down in what Blake could swear is shame.

“It wasn’t up to me whether you lived or died, Blake. It was up to you.” she says, returning to her feet. “I thought you already chose.”

***

The tributes Blake gets for the 74th Hunger Games are two Careers, as per (mostly) usual. They’re both taller than she is, but that’s not new — years of steady, generous meals as a Career tends to do that.

Even if Adam had done his best to keep her fed in her time in the community home, she would always be just a little shorter than she could’ve been. Too many years spent without enough to eat permanently etched into her skeleton. 

They both say they’re handy with spears for distance. Mara says she favors netting traps, while Dillon’s more intent on his swords. Neither of them ask to be coached separately, but in private, Mara admits to her that she’s got a weak knee, a relic of a sparring match gone wrong after she qualified to volunteer. 

Blake’s lips purse, wondering why they let her come, but says little else on the matter.

Their odds are decent. They’re both beautiful, in that young and strapping District 4 way – it’s not vain to say that her district produces some of the most aesthetically blessed tributes. The sponsors will take to them easily. 

In the official betting markets, the morning line puts them each at 7:1, same as the Careers from District 1. There’s no real change in the live tote board, numbers ticking up and down with only marginal changes. The tributes from District 2 are each given 5:1, annoyingly characteristic of any of Cinder’s charges. 

Cinder Fall, the darling of Two. Nine years after claiming her crown with a bow and arrow, she’d been directly responsible for training four victors since. She refuses to step down as a mentor, and no one’s inclined to challenge her. The markets _love_ her tributes.

On the black market, the line isn’t much different, but the tote drops Districts 1 and 3 to 9:1 respectively as gamblers shorten the odds for the longshots in the outer districts. 

But it’s the 13:1 that the male tribute from District 3 is awarded that gives her pause. It’s unusually low for a non-Career district, shortened to nearly twice what it should be. 

The more traditional the Games, the more gamblers tend to favor the trained tributes. The Gamemakers this year had been shuffled substantially, staffing changes that had created a minor stir in the Capitol when they were announced last winter, hinting at a novel structure, like Yang’s and Jaune’s. But it’s not enough to justify the jump of a single tribute, and not his partner.

“I wouldn’t discount the possibility of an arena that favors Three,” Tukson remarks when Blake brings it up. “But I would look into his background and see what you can find. I don’t think it’s anything more than a rich uncle getting ready to sponsor his nephew.”

Blake’s eyes can’t help but glance at the bottom of the list, all the way down twenty-four rows of names.

Ruby Rose sits at a paltry 20:1. 

#### *

There are a total of three things that go wrong on the day Adam is set to volunteer.

One: Fennec Albain reads Blake’s name off of the tiny slip of paper he pulls from the reaping bowl. It sends a jolt of pure electricity through her heart, and the rush of blood from a suddenly racing pulse roars in her ears. 

It’s not a bad thing, she thinks. Just a bit of bad luck. She just has to wait for the Career born and raised to take her place to raise her hand and volunteer.

Two: She never does.

Three: When a skinny, thirteen-year-old boy’s name is read, Adam volunteers for him. 

It’s not that something goes wrong with the last one. It’s meant to be. It’s what he wants, what he’s worked for. 

She’d just never expected to be standing on the stage when it happens. 

Adam turns to face her for the first time when they’re told to shake hands. His eyes are full of pain when she searches them, and she can’t help but blame herself for his grief. 

He reaches up to cup her face with the hand that had just left hers, and presses a mournful kiss against her lips.

A hush falls over the crowd in response, but they break out into applause when Fennec tells them to, a disoriented ovation to match Blake’s daze.

No one comes to say goodbye to her in the Justice Building. The only person who would is waiting on the other side of the wall, same as her.

On the train, they meet their mentors as tributes for the first time instead of as the trainees they used to be. Blake’s familiar enough with Sienna from the time she spends evaluating and coaching each Career, but she’s never met Tukson before.

He’s in his early thirties, with a kind smile and broad shoulders. He has the biggest sideburns she’s ever seen, twin falchion blades of dark hair lining the curve of his jawline. He’s a large man —it’s not hard to imagine his advantage over the other tributes in his Games. Even in the fifteen years since, his form still boasts a natural musculature. Blake thinks his forearms must be at least as wide as her thighs. 

In the compartment, Tukson pulls out a chair and brings himself down to their level at the table. “In the Games,” he starts, leaning forward on the wood. He’s watching her with quiet intelligence, and what little awareness she has left in her mind for the present moment takes note of the unexpected sympathy in his dark eyes. “You can be coached privately, or together.”

“Together,” says Adam instantly, his hand tightening around hers. “We’ve always been together.”

And it’s true, Blake thinks, isn’t it? That there isn’t a single part of her life that Adam hasn’t braided himself into, in the same way she’s seen his clever fingers work thin strips of plant fiber into rope, into baskets, into nets. The way they entangle in hers now, his warm, calloused palm pressed against hers.

She wonders, for a moment, if they’ll die together, too.

Tukson shifts his gaze towards her in a silent question.

“Together,” she echoes.

Sienna’s eyes have never left them.

#### ***

Blake knows she took a risk with Yang the night before. Still, she never expected the consequences to materialize so quickly.

It’s not unusual to see herself on screens in the Capitol, especially during the Games. Especially in the Tribute Center, where it seems like every flat surface doubles as a television. She’s seen the final moments of her own Games reflected back at her in promos and recaps on the walls here so often that they’ve started to blur with her own memory. 

She walks down to the atrium early in the morning to prepare for the opening ceremonies the next day. The morning shows feature more gossip than Games most of the time, so the sooner she wakes up, the better. 

It’s a useless gambit — a grainy image of Yang leaning against Blake is tucked into a bordered inset one of the talk shows on the wall, and it stops her in her tracks.

It looks like it’s taken from a security camera, propped in the corner of the ceiling. Their heads are turned too far to make out their expressions, but it doesn’t matter. The pose is enough, suggestive and ambiguous, plenty for the hosts to engage in a heated debate above a chyron so lewd Blake almost laughs.

If they have tape of this, then they have tape of Jaune carrying Yang from the fourth floor to the tenth in little more than a robe Blake had pulled from her wardrobe. Given Yang’s history with Pyrrha, and Pyrrha’s with Jaune, Blake would’ve expected them to jump on a homewrecker hit piece sooner than they’d engage with her.

If the Capitol media is shifting its interest in her to sign off on reports of her dalliances, fake or not, then she’s crossed an invisible line delineating safety from danger. 

She’s lost in thought when Ruby Rose slides up next to her, appraising the screen quietly. She’s not so much surprised by the intrusion as she is with how natural this creature she’s never even met seems to enter her space, like she belonged there. 

“Isn’t it funny that almost all of the worst moments of her life are caught on camera?” Ruby says, in a high, contemplative voice, echoing a sentiment Blake’s had about herself more than once.

Blake turns to look at the girl for the first time. 

When the cameras aren’t rolling, the tributes from other districts usually carry themselves off camera with an unconscious fear, held timid in their gaits and written starkly on their faces. In Ruby, she only sees a constant energy, like it’s barely restrained beneath her skin, itching to be released. But it’s not anxiety, either: she watches Blake now with a fluid calm. 

Blake’s seen a few of Yang’s worst moments. Her reaping. Her sister’s. Her first kill. Her last. She’s seen Yang in pain before, in public and now in private, too. She can’t imagine that Yang’s grief won’t be a spectacle when her sister dies in the arena. The voyeurs of suffering will snap her up for golden television, her pain a perfect scene. And Blake is suddenly struck by how much she doesn’t want to watch it happen.

Ruby can’t know what’s in her head, but some of what Blake’s thinking must be written on her face, because her brows knit together in concern. 

“It was nice meeting you, Blake,” she says politely. “But I have to go get dressed as a lump of coal. Happy Hunger Games.”

Watching her go, all Blake can think about is the way that District 12 dresses their tributes. In Yang’s Games, she had no mentors, no sponsorships. The stylists weren’t motivated at all to push the envelope, to attract attention. She and Mercury were dressed as miners, unflattering and heavy, cheeks brushed with dark ash. Things haven’t changed much since Yang won. There’s little to be done about stylists without any vision.

When she’d been dressed for her Games, the outfits had made all the difference. Even with Adam’s words and Sienna’s coaching, they wouldn’t have got as far as they had with the upper crust without appearances.

Ruby won’t make it very far at all without it, either. 

Blake pulls out her scroll and calls in a favor, eyes still fixed on the image of herself on the screen.

#### **

A few weeks after Ilia, Blake boards the train to the Capitol in her first year as a mentor. When the blood spilled in the sand of the desert arena dries and the cameras are all turned off, she signs a lease for an apartment on the north side of the city.

She comes home to District 4 only when she’s called. Reapings and Victory Tours, nothing more.

Left with the choice between sleeping in the lion’s den and waiting for them to claim her in the open, she’ll take the former.

They’re always watching her here. She imagines every new face she sees placing bets on when she’ll crack. Waiting to see when she’ll go method and finally fall to her role.

It’s tempting. It would be easy to step into her character. To throw herself into the sea. 

The Capitol is far from any ocean, but she drowns all the same, even if it’s not water filling her lungs. 

#### ***

Blake’s tributes are dressed in a brilliant green fabric, textured and woven in a way that reflects the light of the amphitheater in the same way fish scales refract sunlight underwater. It’s a stunning material. They’re each wearing it in sheets, emerald togas held in place with large, ornate golden pins just below their shoulders.

It’s not particularly to her taste, but it’s flattering enough to win the roar of the crowd as they pass in their chariot, white horses trotting by. 

They’ve each got a crown of woven, golden rope on their heads, too, and these Blake regards with a grimace. But she has no interest in dealing with Corsac and Tifa, so she’s yielded oversight of their newest stylists to Tukson this year. He’s sympathetic to why she can’t stand being around the Albains, and Blake’s grateful for it. 

Crowns are a little premature, in her opinion. Sometimes, tributes can wear that kind of arrogance to their advantage, but she finds cockiness unattractive on most people, so often unearned. 

Blake’s in the gallery, watching the screens of the camera being pointed at the chariots coming out of the porta libitinaria. She’s here with a handful of other mentors to try to goad some of the operators into lingering on her tributes. The more they’re on screen, the more of an impression they make in the eyes of the populace.

It has the unfortunate consequence of drawing attention back on her, beetle-black lenses turning to focus on her face instead, the Capitol’s favorite heartbreak. There are always momentary cuts from the chariots as the Capitol commentators make note of the ancillary action of the Games, of mentors and stylists and sponsors. 

Their cameras focus on Yang, too, who stands at the other end of the area they’re restricted to. She’s better at this than Blake is, reaping slip-up notwithstanding, grinning for the cameras when she catches herself on the screens, the Capitol’s favorite heartbreaker. 

The bruise below Yang’s eye is darker than it was last night, a deep, shining purple expanding across her cheek. It’s uncovered — a visible punishment for what she’d done at Ruby’s reaping. 

When Adam hit her, her own stylists would work magic to hide the evidence beneath blended layers of paste and powders.

But Yang wears the brand exceedingly well, arrogant and unbroken in the way she’s been in this city since her first time here. If anyone could get away with wearing a crown, Yang could. 

There’s actually nothing much to focus on when the District 12 chariot exits the tunnel, the final carriage in the line. That’s what makes it all the sweeter. Her heart swells as the crowd responds, enraptured. Coco’s done her job, taken Blake’s harried suggestion and made it beautiful and functional and intentional with only a few days to prepare.

It’s hard to — it’s hard to describe anyone as _wearing_ smoke, but it’s what the tributes from District 12 are doing, really. Even the close-ups eagerly sought by the camera lens can’t clarify the shimmering waves of smoke and smog — for the coal district, Blake smiles — that engulf them both.

You can only just make out their figures, two children, small of stature, only a little darker than the smog that surrounds them. It’s just what she wanted. Something to conceal, to hide, enchant, in a way that preserved their anonymity and innocence without compromising their chances at sponsors.

No one has to ask for the cameras to stay on them, even when the other chariots continue their circles around the coliseum.

They’re not the splashiest entrance. That goes to the pair from District 3. They’re wearing all black, but their suits blink on and off with flashing lights and arresting strips of vibrant green. The boy looks slightly awkward in his sleek, full-face helmet, head turned and focused straight ahead. The girl’s more free with her motion, swiveling and glancing at the spectacle around her.

Still, though. Blake’s done it.

And it’s worth it, to see Yang’s true smile. Not the one she gives for the cameras, all teeth and winks, but the one that coaxes a careful, genuine across her face. It reaches all the way to her eyes, and carves dimples in her cheeks.

She can’t take her eyes off her sister’s chariot, which is good, since Blake can’t take her eyes off of Yang.

#### *

Their stylists are a pair of sisters from the Capitol, one dressed in an incomprehensible splattering of color and volume, the other in nothing but heavy, dark fabric. Blake can’t help but laugh when she sees them for the first time. She marvels at the way they need to delineate between different flavors of ridiculous.

She refuses to learn their names.

There’s no thought to their privacy. Blake was stripped and scrubbed and preened an hour ago, the same as Adam.

He’d laughed when she’d reached up to feel the smoothness of his face. They’d put something on it he’d said had burned for half an hour. It’s supposed to stop his beard from growing in the arena. 

They’re both standing in underclothes they were given after their appointments with their prep team, while their stylists circle them like they’re deep in thought. Blake wonders briefly if they have any, before looking back at Adam. 

She’s seen his body before, but not like this. Not in front of bright lights and mirrors, and certainly not in front of anyone else. He looks handsome; tall, muscular, tan, his hair washed and cut and shaped for the first time by hands unconcerned with practicality. Red curls have been wrestled into submission and style, and they rise and fall now with a roguish sort of arrogance, a crimson crown atop his head.

He looks like a man. Like a victor.

When she glances in the mirror, she only sees a girl. Her limbs are short and skinny, her brown skin washed out and sickly under the strong lights pointed at them both. Her shoulders pitch forward every time the stylists turn their backs, curling in on herself to hide from the reflection in the mirror, short and thin. Her body hasn’t yet had time to fill in the hollows of her hips, to add to the curves of her thighs and chest.

(She confides as much to Adam later, in their room. On their first night here, he’d climbed out of bed to slip into hers, and he hadn't stopped. “That’s what they like here,” he’ll tell her. “They love to pretend they’re starving.”)

Blake goes through the humiliating experience of having someone dress her when the prep team returns with their outfits for opening ceremonies.They swap her loose chest coverings for a bra that pushes up the little fat she has, and exchange her underwear for some sheer, new thing.

And it’s all awful, exposing, traumatic, until they slip the dress over her head.

She’s never worn one before — they’re not practical for anything in District 4, too easy to pull against your movements in the water — but she’s seen them on the wealthy women in her district. The ones that don’t have to work.

It’s a shocking, deep red, The open sleeves of her bodice create an inverted triangle that forms a collar high along her neck. The material’s adorned with patterns reminiscent of the more elegant knotwork in District 4, and it’s sheer until it trails into the skirt — folds and folds of fabric that flow from her waist in waves of satin. It’s revealing, concealing, elegant, regal and seductive all at once.

She almost feels attractive.

“It’s just like a fairytale!” the rainbow stylist exclaims, drawing Blake’s gaze away from the mirror. She’s almost bouncing up and down as she circles Adam, tucking the last of his crisp, white collar under the lapels of a sharp black suit jacket hemmed with gold. “They’re going to absolutely adore the both of you!” she squeals, stepping back.

And he does look dashing, as he turns to Blake with a knowing smile, an earned vanity in the curl of his lips. He could pass for a prince here, she thinks, in this city built on the backs of paupers.

Next to him, maybe Panem could look at her and see a princess, too.

#### ***

Training starts the morning after the opening ceremonies.

She leaves Mara and Dillon at the fire-starting station with a roll of her eyes. Hunger and the cold are the two things that most Careers have never experienced in their lives. It’s easy for them to neglect their ability to protect themselves from either

Blake has no real interest in sticking around to teach them how to rub a stick really fast. The fire-starting instructor’s plenty capable, so she wanders the Training Center without real aim instead.

Cinder Fall is monopolizing the hand-to-hand station. She’s got her tributes blindfolded. She takes turns hitting them with a closed fist, waiting for them to intercept her using their other senses to guide them. The instructor’s watching helplessly to the side.

The boy from Three is on his own in the plant identification station. Blake tries to watch if he’s doing anything remarkable to justify his rankings in the betting markets — his odds have shortened to 10:1 after his performance in the ceremonies.

There’s nothing. All he’s doing is running his hands over each plant, feeling the stems and leaves and flowers gently under his fingers, as if committing the feel of each of them to memory.

On the train, you can always recognize District 3’s bleak landscape. It’s dominated by flat earth and factories, high-rise buildings where the citizens who work in the factories are all packed and stacked on top of each other in suffocating units. The well-off fare a little better, in sleek complexes that hint at luxury, man-made gardens woven through concrete as a small taste of green. 

At least there’s a natural beauty to District 4.

Blake’s fingers are trailing across the pommels of sabers on the weapons rack behind the training dummies when Yang steps up behind her.

She doesn’t need to turn around to know. Yang is so _physical_ in everything she does. She radiates an energy fierce she can almost feel it charge the air around her.

It would be easy to feel her blindfolded, Blake thinks.

“Hey, Four,” Yang says.

Blake allows herself a private smile before she turns around with a straight face.

“Hi, Twelve,” she says wryly.

There’s a question in Yang’s eyes, but she can’t ask it without giving away the game. It’s obvious what she wants. Or maybe she just knows this girl already, can already speak her language.

Yang’s smart enough to know the weight of the risk she took by sending her Coco Adel. She doesn’t usually style for the Games, and Blake had used her friendship to help Yang’s district instead of her own. There are too many eyes and ears around to pose the question outright, so she gives her an easy out.

“Your tributes looked good yesterday,” Blake says casually.

“They did,” Yang agrees, eyes watching her carefully. “We got a new pair of stylists this year. Last minute change, weren’t told why. But I’m grateful to whoever arranged it.”

Blake hums, and plucks a particularly ornate dagger from the rack. She frowns at its balance before replacing it. “Sometimes they just swap out the help,” she says absently.

Yang’s eyebrows pinch together, but the right corner of her mouth starts to curl up. 

Blake pulls out a butterfly knife to twirl back and forth between her fingers, spinning through each knuckle. “It’s not just Twelve,” she continues, recalling the research she’d done since arriving. “Half of the Gamemakers were swapped out this year. It seems like they’re looking for a new spin.”

“Yeah? Anyone I need to pay attention to?”

Blake shakes her head. “Not that I can tell. The inner workings of Roman’s mind are an enigma,” she says, rolling her eyes at the Head Gamemaker. “There’s a new filmmaker on staff now, so expect some lingering shots of flowers as a metaphor for stolen youth.”

Yang laughs, and the sound bubbles in Blake’s chest, warm and fluttery.

“I never really got into Capitol movies. They all look stupid.”

It’s true. Most art that comes out of the Capitol is either entirely preoccupied with itself, languid, mournful opines about the delicate balance of their fabricated hierarchies. Twisted values, meaningless musings on power and beauty. That, or they’re almost offensively grotesque in their caricatures of the districts around them.

“Weiss used to bring back the scary ones for Ruby to watch,” Yang muses. “But I don’t think any of them know what fear really is.”

“No,” Blake agrees. She thinks of her parents drowning in the middle of the ocean, of Adam’s hands curling into fists, of how impossibly hot blood can be as it gushes to the surface in pulsing waves to the beat of a heart slowly dying.

She looks back at Yang, and she only sees her face when Ruby’s name was called, of the flash of terror Blake felt when she pulled up Yang’s undershirt to reveal the bruises underneath. 

“They don’t.”

She flicks her eyes up to Yang’s left cheek at the dark bruise there. 

“I see you haven’t died of blunt force trauma yet,” Blake remarks.

“Oh, well, knock on wood,” says Yang, looking around briefly before rapping her knuckles against the wooden hilt of an axe on a lower rung of the rack. “Nah, the ol’ bone jail’s doing just fine—”

“Rib cage,” she corrects automatically. 

“That’s what I said,” she says, slapping her hands against the sides of her torso lightly. “Couple cracks here and there. Freddie Spaghetti says—”

“…Jaune?” she asks.

“Yeah, Noodle Boy. Vomit Comet. Doctor Diameter,” she says, impatiently. “He thought my spleen had ruptured for a sec. Turned as pale as Weiss at the idea of cutting me open on his dining room table. But no, I’m good. I think they were just trying to see if they could start a new skin tone trend.” 

When Blake’s brows knit together in confusion, Yang winks with her good eye. “Because I’m all sorts of interesting colors.” 

“No,” she says flatly. 

“Joke’s on them, though, since they’ll never get to see,” Yang continues as if she hadn’t heard her. “I’m pretty choosy about who I take my clothes off for.”

Blake feels herself flush. The memories of seeing Yang’s body push to the forefront of her mind automatically. She tries to tamp down the recollection of the way the thin fabric of her wet tank top had clung to the outline of the muscles underneath, abdominals carved into her skin as if sculpted from a block of marble. She tries to forget the feel of her burning palm pressed against her skin, feeling each breath Yang took as each inhale and exhale pushed against her hand. 

She clears her throat, and Yang looks far too pleased with herself.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” she says, and Yang’s grin falters, expression shifting into something serious. 

“Thank you for your help,” Yang says. _Thank you for risking yourself for me,_ she knows she means. _Thank you for getting Jaune_. She can feel the depth of Yang’s gratitude in the way her face softens, though her gaze is no less intense.

_Thank you for helping my sister._

Yang’s right hand is resting on the railing of the weapons rack beside them, only inches from her own. She doesn’t know when she got so close, but Blake has to swallow the urge to reach out and grab it. She wants to feel it again in hers like she had the other night.

She hadn’t had enough time then. She’d let go too soon. She wants to see how they fit together again. It almost feels like instinct to reach for her, like a memory indelibly burned into her muscles as if she’s done it a thousand times before.

“So how come I never see your weapon here?”

Yang’s voice pulls her from her thoughts, and she blinks back to the physical space between the two of them.

“You know, the throw-y knife on a string thing? Wait, shit, is that insensitive? Do you not want to talk—” Yang starts to move her hands again, gesticulating wildly in a panic about the perceived faux pas.

A brief glance up and around them confirms that her panic is attracting unwanted attention, so she reaches out to grab Yang’s arms and keep her still. 

Yang freezes instantly at the contact. Her eyes widen ever so slightly.

“It’s okay,” Blake says. And here’s her shot, she thinks, let’s see how it feels, just for a second—

“Unless you don’t want me to talk about these weapons either?” She runs her hands down, down, down, past the cuff of Yang’s jacket, pressing her palms over hers and curling both of their hands into light fists.

Yang had struck a girl from District 8 so hard and fast on her third day of her Games that the bones of her nose had pressed all the way into her brain. Blake can remember how suddenly the cannon had fired, how Yang had jumped in surprise at the blast, before the body had even hit the ground.

The skin of Yang’s left palm is hard at the hill, rough and thick with callouses. The right is firmer. The synthetic padding on the prosthetic doesn’t feel like skin, but it’s just as warm as the rest of her. She can’t imagine how the Capitol might look at it with anything other than awe. 

Yang looks curiously down at their joined hands. She shakes her head as if to clear it, then looks back up at her, expectant. 

“So... the chain scythe?”

It’s not funny. Really, it isn’t, Blake thinks. It’s awful, bloody, disgusting, but—

“They don’t allow it in the Training Center anymore,” she says wryly. “The year after I won, every tribute was scrambling for a chance to use it. Several were added to the weapon racks, but things got a little out of control.” She feels herself grin, but she really can’t keep the smile off her face at the way their hands are still joined, passing it off as amusement instead. 

“Tell me,” Yang insists. 

“Do you remember the boy who came second four years ago? The tall boy from District Seven? He had a limp in the arena as soon as he stepped off the platform.”

Yang nods. 

“It turns out that swinging what’s basically a sword on a rope in a room full of teenagers can threaten the integrity of the tendons in someone’s leg,” she says, heart jumping at the way Yang squeezes her hands in mirth.

“They don’t even let _me_ use it in here if my tributes want the instruction,” Blake continues. “The first time I tried, a Career from Two came to see what the sound was — the ribbon makes a hum in the air — and I nearly took off his head. His stylist came to the fourth floor that night to personally berate me for cutting off half of his top knot. I’m lucky it wasn’t Cinder.”

“How did you even learn how to use it?” Yang asks incredulously. “Why isn’t it more common with Careers?”

“It’s not typically taught. My mentor, Sienna…” she begins, then pulls her hands away from Yang’s with no small amount of regret. “She trained with a whip at home, but she won her Games with a length of chain.”

She turns to face the rack again, looking up at the wall of hanging weapons, tilting her head to follow the way it curves up the ceiling into stocked racks that dangle above them. Blake reaches up and plucks a bullwhip down from where it hangs overhead.

“She was teaching me to use both. She thought that I needed a ranged weapon. I could throw knives well, but Sienna was insistent that I find something I couldn’t lose. I was handy with a shortsword, but that wasn’t enough for her. It didn’t have the reach of the kinds that Adam carried.”

She doesn’t stumble over his name like she used to. 

Blake steps towards one of the training dummies a few feet away while adjusting her grip on the handle of the weapon in her hand. “So she had me try a whip, just to see if I liked it. Sometimes ranged aim can translate decently across weapon types.”

“When I used it for the first time...” Blake says, eyeing the silicon body in front of her before she cracks the whip with a sharp, practiced jerk of her arm. The tip barely collides with the pliant, rubbery surface of the dummy, careening off to the side after a brief swipe of its side. “It just felt off,” she laughs. “See? I still can’t do it.”

“I don’t get how you can throw a sword boomerang but not crack a whip. What’s ‘off’ mean?”

“Like the weight was wrong. When I use a whip or a chain… it’s like my balance is off. As if I’m waiting for a specific kind of jerk at the end of the motion, with a different kind of momentum. The kick’s either too fast, or slow, or too light, too heavy. I could never seem to time it right.” She rewinds the whip and hangs it back above them, shrugging while she does. “Besides, a whip is meant to hurt, not to kill. It’s meant to incapacitate your victim with pain until you can come and finish them off. I didn’t like it.”

“So I asked her if there was anything with a blade on the end,” Blake shrugs, turning back around to lean against the wall, arms crossed. “She told me there wasn’t anything like that in here, but that she could get me one, if I wanted. And then she did, on my tenth day in the arena.” Blake laughs gently in disbelief. “I can’t even imagine what it could’ve cost, even after all of the time I’ve spent dealing with sponsors here.”

“Wait, so you threw it for the first time in the arena?” Yang exclaims.

Blake nods lightly.

“Holy shit.”

“It felt right,” she shrugs. “The kusarigama belonged in my hand. My body already knew what to do with it.”

 _(Like with you,_ she thinks.)

“That’s incredible,” Yang says.

“Well, I killed three people with it,” she frowns.

“Less incredible,” Yang agrees. She pauses for a moment as if weighing her next words carefully. “But I’m pretty sure at least one of them had it coming.”

Blake has to cover her mouth to hide her snicker at the comment, and she almost misses the way Yang’s eyes follow the movement. She wonders if Yang shares the same ridiculous fixation with Blake’s hands, too. 

She’s a little slow on the uptake, but she realizes then that she _likes_ Yang. She likes the way she talks, unafraid to toe the line, honest and forthright with the way she feels. A far cry from the way most people treat Blake like glass. It’s not just her words — Yang speaks with her whole body, in a way Blake already knows how to translate. In a city of lies and camouflage, there’s nothing so clear as Yang. 

Blake doesn’t know whether it’s out of concern for her sister’s safety — there’s something precious about Ruby she can’t put her finger on yet — or if she just wants an excuse to see Yang again, but the question to help with both is out of her mouth before she can stop herself.

“Would you want to take a walk in the garden with me? On the roof, later tonight?”

Yang’s eyes are searching, confused. Maybe she doesn’t know, hasn’t been here long enough to know the places you go to be alone, or at the very least unheard.

“It’s not good for talking. The wind’s a little loud,” she says airily, and understanding clicks on Yang’s face. “But it’s beautiful.”

Yang chuckles nervously, reaching up to tighten her high ponytail in what Blake clocks as an anxious tic.

“Okay, this gonna sound weird, but uh. Are there any bees up there?”

Blake tilts her head in confusion. 

“Bees?”

“Yeah like, bzz,” Yang says, bringing her hands up to waggle her fingers rapidly in a crude pantomime, like the vibrating wings of a flying insect. “Bees.”

“Not that I’ve noticed,” Blake answers slowly. “I think it’s too high for them to fly.”

Yang sighs in relief, then shoots a finger gun at her, prompting another laugh from Blake. “Alright.”

“Then I’ll see you later,” she promises. She starts to move back to her tributes. She can see from here that Dillon’s managed to nurture a healthy flame to life, while Mara’s still attempting to try her luck without matches, twisting a stick furiously between her palms. 

“Bye, Blake,” Yang calls.

She smiles.

#### **

It’s easier to stomach the sponsors who place bets, too.

The gamblers, at least, have something real to lose, money, property, servants. Not that there was a legal distinction between the last two, anyway.

She knows how to bait them into opening their wallets at the promise of a return on a new investment, trailed whispers of handsome odds and steady strikes. Give me a shield, she says, for her boy to block the volleys of arrows from the pair of archers from District 1. Give me a shield, and I’ll make you both kings.

She enjoys it, even. Her only job is to get her tributes out of the arena. There’s no loyalty owed to these gamblers who try their hand a better life in a city already dripping with an opulence paid with blood. Let them have a taste of loss, she thinks. Let them feel it in the only way they can understand.

It’s the ones that can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, who manage to crawl under her skin. The Games are staged and shaped to whet the Capitol’s entertainment, their thirst for story.

The characters in two dozen children, the setting in the arena. The story in the last few days of life for all but one, stitched together in the editing room with footage from countless cameras.

They’re not gamblers. They’re buyers, jumping at the chance to see themselves in a story scraped together from the final moments of teenagers torn from the arms of their parents. It makes them feel important, to pay for the arrows that send five children to their deaths. To have sent the thermal jacket that had meant the difference between hypothermia and a chance at the Final Three. 

All the worse if their chosen champion is just a little too handsome, a little too striking, a little too temptingly young. They’ll trade their money for a sequel, written in the pages between their bedsheets.

Blake’s never asked which ones paid for the kusarigama.

She knows she’d kill them if she knew. 

#### ***

On the rooftop with Yang, she can feel her pulse in her throat as it thrums against her skin. They’re sitting on the flat, wide railing, but it’s not being close to the edge that has Blake’s heart racing. 

“You and I aren’t allowed to put any money on tributes,” she says, pulling out her scroll. “But that doesn’t mean that we’re not allowed to keep track of how other people are betting. Odds are calculated based on the wagers made on each player -- you’re gambling against every other gambler, not the house. The more money on a tribute, the lower the payout, and the lower the odds.”

Yang watches her fingers move across the screen with quiet interest, peering over her shoulder. Her exhales are warm on Blake’s neck, and she has to fight to keep herself from shivering before continuing. 

“There are two time periods to place a bet: before the arena, and after. Bets placed before are considered blind since you can’t know how tributes will behave until the Games actually start. It’s riskier, but more rewarding -- the house will double your return on blind bets. Still, most are placed after the training scores are revealed, and after the interviews. Hand me your scroll?”

Yang acquiesces, passing it to her. 

Blake starts to transfer the code on her own scroll to hers, keeping her eyes fixed on the progress bar as she continues. “It’s all based on how the public perceives you, or how they think you’ll be perceived. Sponsors can mean the difference between a victor and a corpse, so popularity will push your odds down, too.”

“You wouldn’t happen to remember mine, would you?”

“High,” Blake smiles, shaking her head in amusement. 

“There’s no accounting for taste,” Yang says, making a face.

Blake hands her scroll back. “Leaks about the Games are strictly forbidden. Punishment by death and all that. But nothing in the Capitol is ever airtight – there’s always someone who knows someone who knows someone. People started to make a living off of chasing down leads about arena design, stylist plans, sordid details about the tributes. Anything that could tip the scales.”

“May the odds be ever in your favor,” Yang says. 

“Right. So on the official markets,” she says, pulling up the tote boards. “Things usually look pretty consistent before the arena. They’re all heavily regulated, so making bets made on illicit information doesn’t happen unless you want to be detained indefinitely by the Capitol.”

The display shows the current odds for all twenty-four tributes, and they both wince slightly at the 8:1 odds given to each of her Careers in contrast to the paltry 16:1 given to Ruby. 

“Better than twenty-four to one, I guess,” Yang says with a shrug. 

“Her odds are shorter than they were at the start. The opening ceremonies helped, too,” Blake says encouragingly. “And tributes that have victors in the family are always bumped up a little higher. They’re betting on sponsors wanting to keep families together when the Games start.”

“And do they?” Yang says lightly, but Blake understands the intent lacing the question, the unease.

“Yes,” she says firmly.

Capitol citizens have enough empathy for understanding the ubiquity of family. Even if they lack the self-awareness to recognize that the deaths could all stop if they wanted them to.

“You can use the official odds to know who has the sponsors you should be trying to pull from. It’s an easy way to pick off anyone with deep pockets.” Blake swipes again, to a different screen. “But things are a little more interesting when you get to all the betting that happens under the table.”

Her Careers’ odds are about the same, if a little longer. while Ruby’s odds have shortened slightly, ticking down to 15:1. She watches Yang study the listings, freckles dark under the blue hue of the screen and the dim of the night. There’s a small cowlick curling off-center from where it should be, and she’s struck by the urge to reach out and gently brush it back into place.

Blake jumps slightly when Yang reaches up absently to fix it instead, having almost succumbed to a far too intimate gesture of familiarity. 

Yang turns her head to her. “The boy from District Three? His odds are twelve to one. Isn’t that a little low for a district without Careers?”

Blake nods in assent. “It means they know something we don’t. I’ve been watching his odds shorten for the last few days.”

Truth be told, she’s been a little distracted by the Rose-Xiao-Long siblings recently, otherwise she’d have paid more attention. All she’s done is watch him once in the Training Center and put out a request for his background to her usual sources.

“It’s rare that tributes from Three know how to fight, but he has to have something up his sleeve to justify this kind of jump.”

Yang bites her lip, and Blake tries to not let it pull her gaze down. “Does this really help?”

“When you learn how to read it,” Blake admits. “It’s easier in some years than others, though. Four years ago, especially.”

“Let me guess: the water arena?”

Blake rolls her eyes. “It wasn’t more than an hour after my tributes had been reaped that people started making bets. I think the final odds were something like one to two each for both of them, almost completely worthless. We figured out pretty quickly what we were headed for.”

Yang leans forward with exaggerated interest. “Oh?” she says, resting her chin on her knuckles, eyebrows disappearing into her hair. “So did you teach them how to swim?”

Blake snorts. 

What she’d seen originally as a considerable advantage hadn’t mattered much at the very end, but they’d gotten pretty close. Her pair had made it all the way to the final four. All Careers were taught to swim, after all.

But even if hers had moved like fish in the water from a lifetime spent in District 4, an upbringing in the ocean had done little to stem the bleeding when Cardin Winchester of Two had reached the pair of them with his sword.

“There wasn’t much to do,” she shrugs. “I tried to teach them how to hold their breath a little longer. It’s not something most of us are trained to do.”

At this, Yang’s eyes widen with genuine interest. “Yeah? How long can you hold yours?”

“…Fourteen minutes, three seconds,” she admits, and ducks to dodge a shove from an incredulous Yang, laughter erupting from both their chests. 

“Shut the fuck up! Really?”

“Really,” she says.

“How!"

“District secrets, I’m afraid.” 

“Well,” Yang grins. “I don’t know how either of them could’ve lost with a trick like that.”

“That’s the thing about being underwater,” Blake says, softly. “You have to come back up eventually.” 

Yang’s quiet for a moment. “Isn’t it terrifying to be down there for so long? I’ve had enough hands around my throat to know I wouldn’t be able to focus on anything other than breathing.”

Ilia’s instruction comes back to Blake, and she can feel herself smile remembering time spent gently drifting at the bottom of the sea. 

“It’s terrifying at first,” she admits. “You have to learn to live with the fear. You can’t push it aside, or you’ll never surface. But you can’t let it control you either, or you won’t make it past the third minute.”

Yang’s thoughtful, silent in response, her strange eyes contemplative. 

Blake’s curiosity gets the best of her, though. “Speaking of fear,” she starts, “Can I ask, why bees?”

Yang’s lips form a hard line in response to the question. Her eyes flick towards the blooming flowers in the center of the garden, the ones Blake had politely avoided when they’d both arrived, and there’s an almost imperceptible shake to her right hand. 

“You don’t have to answer,” Blake rushes, not meaning to push. They really don’t know much about each other at all — she’s not entitled to Yang’s life, even if there’s a part of her that feels like she belongs in it.

“No, it’s okay. It’s fine,” Yang promises, but her shoulders pull together in an uncharacteristic hunch. “Do you know anything about tracker jackers?”

“They used them in the first rebellion,” she answers slowly. “Genetically engineered hornets of some kind?” Blake answers. 

“Yeah. Well, wasps. We still have nests of them left back in Twelve, if you’re over the fence.” She winks with her good eye, but there’s something flat to the gesture. “Which no one would ever be, of course. But they were in my Games, though no one really remembers. I think I was the only one who ran into them in my year.”

“Were you stung?” Blake asks.

“Yeah, uh, hang on—” she rasps, sliding down to lean flat on the raspy concrete railing. She tucks both hands behind her head and squeezes her eyes shut before starting again.

Blake can understand the instinct. Sometimes it’s easier to handle the memories of the arena if you’re not superimposing them on everything in the world around you.

“I was still with Mercury. I think it wasn’t even near its nest... it could’ve been just a scout or something. But it got me.”

“Did it hurt?” There aren’t a lot of bees in District 4 -- she can’t remember ever being stung. Her stings mostly extended to the occasional run-in with jellyfish, bare feet mistakenly pressed into their washed-up bodies on the shore, tentacles wrapped around her legs underwater.

“Oh, like a motherfucker,” Yang grimaces. “But they weren’t made for war just for that. Pain’s easy.”

“The venom made me see things. Suddenly, Mercury was just there, coming at me from the trees. I saw him attack, so I fought back.” Yang takes a breath, exhaling slowly through her nose.. 

“I didn’t have it in me to finish him off after I’d broken his legs. He was my partner — what was I supposed to do? I’d never killed anyone before.”

Blake tries to imagine it. Adam used to get in her head, make her think things that weren’t real. It wasn’t much of a stretch to extend it towards seeing things that didn’t exist, as much as the prospect scared her. But there’s another part of Yang’s story gnawing at her, a dawning realization that has regret welling up in her throat. At her own cruelty, the first time they ever met.

“So your first kill was—”

“—An accident.” Yang finishes.

She’s quiet for a while, until she says the only thing she can think, “I’m sorry.”

“You believe me?” Yang says. There’s a vulnerability in her voice she hasn’t heard before, not even when her skin was under Blake’s hands, at her mercy. 

She suddenly can’t stand the sound of it, can’t bear the tension in the air between them. Can’t take the way a space in her mind is blooming to accommodate Yang, so quickly it’s making her head spin and her heart heavy. 

“No,” she deadpans. “You didn’t need to spend so much time coming up with an excuse for why you’re afraid of bugs.”

Yang laughs once, short and loud, and the tension mercifully breaks, snuffed out in an instant. She sticks her tongue out in her best guess at Blake’s direction. “Why are you helping us, anyway? What’s in it for you?”

Blake pauses for a moment, leaning back on her hands. Yang’s eyes are still closed, and she seizes the chance to take her in without her knowing. 

“I’ve recently figured out that I’ve been making all the wrong choices,” she says, and Yang’s eyes blink open to regard her with quiet interest.

“I thought I might try to make a good one.”

*

Tukson sits with her before she has her private session with the Gamemakers. Sienna took Adam in five minutes ago, and the ten minutes she has left to wait are agonizing. As Careers, they’re expected to do their best. There’s no strategy here, no subtlety. They’re meant to score high. That’s it. 

“What if I don’t do well?” she whispers.

Tukson rubs at his face. He still looks young, but there’s an exhaustion in his eyes. His wife just had their second child, and she can tell he’s anxious to return to his family. She’s never met them, but she figures he’d make a good father. Blake wonders if he’s ever mentored a tribute as young as her. 

“It doesn’t really matter,” he says. “No one expects you to.” He says, but it stings more than it soothes, and she recoils in response.

“I’m better than most of the fighters here,” she says hotly. “I can fight. I’m good at it!”

Tukson studies her for a moment. He takes in her adamant expression, and something falters in his face. “You don’t want to be good at it,” he sighs. “All that’s needed is for Adam to score well, and he will, based on what he’s shown us. Nothing else is important.”

When Blake opens her mouth to protest, his brow furrows, and he cuts her off instead. “Blake, listen to me. You don’t need to do better than him. You don’t need to impress anyone,” he says, and there’s an edge to his voice now that makes her stop and listen. “Let him keep you safe, okay? He’s not your responsibility.”

She hangs her head in front of her and stares at the polished surface of the floor. Her feet only barely touch the ground. She takes care of Adam, and he takes care of her. It’s only ever been the two of them. 

“He’s always been my responsibility,” she says. 

#### ***

Blake still has Yang’s jacket from the night she stripped it from shoulders. She takes it back the day before the tributes are set to have their performances judged by the Gamemakers. Blake tries to not think about it as an excuse to see her. 

The door to District 12’s apartment swings open with Weiss’s face behind it, mouth a hard, thin line. There are screams and noises of exertion from behind her, disconcerting and loud, but Weiss doesn’t flinch at the sounds.

She's standing in the doorway protectively, like she expects Blake to push her way inside. She tries not to laugh at the idea of the shorter girl keeping anyone from anything before she remembers Weiss’s lifetime of training as a Career, compared to Blake’s own meager handful.

She holds up the jacket in explanation. Weiss stares for a moment, then keeps her eyes fixed on her as she calls back into the apartment. “Yang, Blake’s here with your clown costume.”

Yang gives an affronted noise from the room. “Weiss, _stop_ calling it that, it’s n— RUBY, GET BACK HERE!” 

The corners of Weiss’s mouth turn up when she turns away from Blake, beckoning her to follow to the sounds of melee.

Blake steps inside warily. 

District 12’s apartment has been turned into a sparring ring. The furniture is pushed to the sides, chairs and tables and cabinets piled along the walls to clear a space on the floor. The makeshift mat in the center is stacked high with rugs, and pillows and cushions pulled from seats.

Oscar sits politely in one of the cushionless armchairs, legs crossed, watching the two sisters circling each other in the ring. He gives Blake a polite nod as she and Weiss enter the room.

“You’re not always going to be able to run away, Ruby,” Yang says sagely. She scoops her younger sister from where she’s trying to scramble away and hoists her over her shoulder in an easy carry. “Sometimes, you just have to stand your ground and fight, no matter what.”

Blake can’t even imagine what kind of painkillers she’s on.

Ruby’s scrambling, mindful of her sister’s ribs, left only to try to reach and grab at her sister’s face and hair, legs and arms flailing wildly. “Yang!” she whines, and Blake laughs as much as winces at the pitch of the shriek. “Put me down!” 

Yang catches her eye at the sound of Blake’s laugh, though, snapping her head towards her and breaking out into a wide grin. She feels herself flush in response, heat rising to the surface of her skin, and she ducks her head. 

Right before looking straight back up at the sound of a startled squeal from Yang.

“You dare break the sisters’ oath of no tit hits?” Yang gasps, strained and dramatic, clutching her chest. Ruby picks herself off the floor after being unceremoniously dropped. Apparently, she’d taken advantage of the distraction.

She stands up and holds her fist in front of her face — in front of a shit-eating grin, Blake notes — bouncing up and down on each foot. She circles her wounded prey, dropping her expression into a mask of seriousness. 

“Anything goes in the Games, Yang,” she says, matching her sister’s earlier, somber tone.

She throws a left hook that Yang sidesteps easily, still holding her hand to her shirt. There’s too much momentum, and Ruby loses her footing, stumbling clumsily forward. There’s another yelp from her as she almost falls over, before she spins around to face her sister again.

Blake’s never seen anyone lazily sweep someone’s legs before until now, as Yang deftly knocks her sister to the ground with a kind of careless swagger. “No one’s going to sponsor such a brat,” she quips.

“Not with that attitude,” Ruby says, facedown and muffled against a pillow on the floor. Yang extends one long leg out to press her bare foot against Ruby’s scalp with a lightly punitive pressure. 

“Shhh,” she whispers, and Ruby whines in submission. Yang looks up at Blake again. “Hi,” she beams.

“Hi,” Blake repeats, unsure of whether to snort or stare in horror. “Should you be sparring with your ribs?” 

“No,” Weiss immediately answers next to her, crossing her arms. Ruby struggles under her sister’s foot, turning her head to the side and gasping free. 

“When you break a bone, it gets stronger than it was before when it heals. So technically I’m helping her become a supersoldier!” Ruby says, blowing strands of hair out of her face. Weiss looks at Blake with pleading eyes. 

“I… don’t think that’s accurate,” Blake says, trying for diplomacy.

Ruby sticks her tongue out, and she looks exactly like Yang for a moment, a catch of familiarity on two sisters who have almost nothing in common in appearance. 

“Um, or it could be, I guess?” she tries instead, looking back up at Yang and trying not to laugh. 

Yang stretches her arms over her head (and Blake doesn’t stare, she _doesn’t,_ at the way the fabric of her clothes shifts, at the coy strip of skin and _muscle_ revealed, just above her waistband) and exhales slowly before resting back down from her toes. 

She uses her foot again to roll her sister over onto her back. She nods with her head to Blake, who snaps back to attention. “If you’re so concerned about my health, you can take over teaching the worm hand-to-hand,” Yang says. She moves over to Oscar in his chair and pulls him to his feet. 

“Why not Weiss?” she says hesitantly. Weiss sighs next to her. 

“Oh, Weiss can’t fight,” Yang laments. “ turns into little fight slaps with Ruby. It’s really sad, actually. You don’t mind, do you?”

Blake shakes her head. 

“Great,” Yang says, and her smile’s dazzling — Blake thinks she’d do anything she asks. “I think she’ll be a little more patient with you, Ruby, seeing as you haven’t had sixteen years to annoy her to death yet.” 

She backs up with Oscar, and begins circling him to correct his stance. “I’ve got to take care of things with my star pupil. Square up, Oscar. Remember, don’t look at your feet when you’re moving, but _keep moving._ ”

Ruby groans, but finally scrambles obediently to her feet while Blake moves off of the wall to join her.

She can’t help but marvel at the way Yang handles Oscar. She’s giving up some of the only time she might have left with Ruby to make sure he’s not left wholly unprotected, so that he might have a chance. Even if his death means one less tribute in the way of her sister coming home. 

Her mind flicks to her own tributes, eight floors below. 

“Alright, Ruby, put your hands up,” she says.

#### **

Twenty-four children, two from each district. Taken every year as a punishment for the First Rebellion, for the sins of their parents, of their parents’ parents, of their parents’ parents’ parents, as time goes on and on and on.

It isn’t like the citizens of the Capitol are ignorant to what they are and what they do. It’s not as if they can’t understand that what they’re doing is rejoicing in the deaths of children. It’s just that most of them are eager to believe the lie that their victims deserve it. 

There will always be pockets of those who are humble enough to accept the nature of their own realities inside of a complacent whole. They’re the only kind of people Blake can stand to be around in this city.

The camerawoman in charge of directing all of Blake’s interviews and formal appearances with the press quits working for the Games in quiet disgust after a few years, and she insists they keep in touch.

Velvet’s trying to break into the scene as a documentary filmmaker now. It’s a struggle — the Capitol keeps sending her first piece, a compilation of the last surviving accounts of the First Rebellion, back with suggestions she has to take about lines to cut and shots to replace. 

They curse (quietly, quietly) together about it in dark clubs loud enough to drown out their voices. If Blake’s heart twinges with jealousy as she watches Velvet fall in love with Coco Adel in front of her, she doesn’t say anything. If they get up to dance together while she sits alone at the bar, it’s a small price to pay for the taste of companionship. 

Still, there’s an invisible stain the Capitol leaves on you, no matter how you feel about it, indifferent to your antipathy. 

It’s the price of breathing, eating, keeping warm. Vegetables plucked by children’s hands in District 11. Bread made with grain grown in District 8. Light and heat enough to fill the expansive, soaring ceilings of what seems like every Capitol building generated from the dams in District 5, and the coal mined in District 12. There’s nothing here that doesn’t come to her saturated in suffering, and she can’t scourge the mark it leaves from her soul.

Even Coco, a radicalized stylist from a dynasty of fashion, can’t erase what she was born to. She’ll concede that the Games are immoral in the same breath that she’ll snap at an Avox. As if whatever reason they’ve had their tongues severed was justified, as if she’s read the records from their nonexistent trials. 

They don’t need to cut Blake’s tongue to keep her voiceless. She has no defense prepared.

#### ***

When they unveil the training scores, Blake’s grouped with the rest of the team for District 4 in the sitting room. She leans against the wall warily, while Tukson, Tifa, and the Albain brothers surround their tributes encouragingly around the screen.

Most Careers score between eight and ten, so it’s not not surprising when the tributes from One each pull an eight, and the ones from Two a pair of tens.

The boy from Three scores a seven. Either he’s intentionally concealing his skill from the Gamemakers, or there’s nothing there to justify his shortened odds, Like always, she thinks, frustrated, it’s impossible to know.

The girl, a tiny, orange-haired girl named Penny Polendina, receives the higher score. Her eight doesn’t seem to shift the needle in her favor much at all, not like her partner’s, when Blake continues to refresh the markets on her scroll. It’s yet another reminder that they’re still out of the loop. 

Mara pulls a nine, while an eight flashes on the screen for Dillon.

Still enough to be competitive, but Blake can feel their anxiety, and her throat begins to ache in sympathy. Their interviews are tomorrow, and their confidence is starting to wane.

Their tributes, even with the scores, are slipping in both markets. Blake’s unease at the Games having a different edge to them this year seems to be increasingly shared by the general populace. It’s not unreasonable to make the assumption that her Careers — or any of them — won’t do as well in an unusual Games. 

It’s the reason Yang won hers, and Jaune’s his. The underdogs in the outer districts have more of a chance when the trained tributes are like fish out of water.

The one decent thing she can say is that it least could be an advantage for Ruby.

When they tick up to District 12, Oscar receives a three, and Blake winces in sympathy. She doesn’t notice that she’s holding her breath until Ruby’s face flashes on the screen, followed by a shining, brilliant eleven. It’s the highest score she can remember seeing, save for Adam’s.

Her exhale is drowned out by the sounds of incredulity from the people in the room with her. Yang had received a one for her score three years ago, so it’s impossible to compare the sisters. But it’s obvious to anyone looking at Ruby’s frame that she doesn’t share her sister’s physique, or the strength that comes with it. 

“How does that happen?” Dillon exclaims. 

She scrambles for an answer, ducking Tukson’s watchful gaze. “Her sister must’ve been training her,” she manages, struggling to school her face into neutrality.

She tries not to think of the way Ruby had managed only to dodge her attacks the other day, never landing even a single strike back. 

“So we can expect hand-to-hand?” Mara asks expectantly. 

“I’d imagine,” she shrugs. 

Corsac speaks up from his stiff posture in one of the armchairs. “Come now, Blake. You’re telling me you don’t know anything about the girl? Haven’t you been spending most of your free time with her sister?” he probes, voice as grating as it always has been. “You must know something about a score that high.”

“Blake’s entitled to her needs,” his brother drawls. “I doubt she’s been doing much talking with Xiao Long. Haven’t you been reading the tabloids?” 

“If she scores that high, maybe it’s worth something to ally with her,” Tukson notes, stealing her attention away from the twins in a way he’s practiced at, though his words do little to calm her for once. 

He’s offering her their help. It should be comforting, but she doesn’t want them anywhere near Ruby.

“Do you think Yang would be interested?” he asks.

“No,” Blake says instantly, a touch louder and faster than she means to, and she can feel herself flush.

“With a score like that, if Rose isn’t an ally, then she’s a threat,” Dillon says, oblivious to the tension building in the room. 

She can’t help the anger that builds inside of her at the statement. It’s not his fault, it’s not—he’s right, he’s right, and this is her job, to help him, to protect him, to keep him safe and alive. She’s his mentor, and Ruby is not her tribute— 

“Are you feeling well, Blake? You look a little flushed,” Fennec asks, feigned innocence in his voice, and oh, how she hates him. 

She feels the violence dormant in her blood turn to fire, dangerous and hot and razor sharp, fingers curling as if around the handle of the weapon she wishes she had in her hand. 

He looks at her with the same smug expression he’s looked at her with since she was fourteen, and she’s overwhelmed by the venom that fills her in response, his face anathema to her, arrogant and acrid.

They’re all fools. For never realizing how afraid of her they should be. 

But she fights to swallow the anger, pushing it back to call on later, when it’s useful, when it matters. 

Instead of picking up a knife and throwing it into his throat, Blake clears her own. “I’m fine, thank you, Fennec.” She pushes off the wall and sets her shoulders back. “Mara, come with me. Let’s go over your interview again.”

The girl gets up and moves to follow her, while Blake turns on her heels, trying not to think of a pair of elevens.

#### *

As much as he’s used force to get what he wants in his life, Adam’s time in the Capitol has proven just how naturally he fits among them, flexing charm and flashing teeth to rise as the Prince of District 4.

It’s a title almost mockingly uttered by Fennec after their opening ceremonies, but one Sienna pounced on adroitly after hearing it, moulding it into his image until it follows him everywhere. 

He has the crowd spellbound for his interview, an affable introduction followed by a more serious discussion of their relationship that pulls dreamy sighs from the Capitol citizens lining the aisles.

But then Adam pauses for a long moment, as if deciding something. He stares at the glossy, polished wood of the stage, then pushes his hands into his pockets in an almost helpless pose. He looks back up. “Clover, do you think all of our friends here can keep a secret?”

A confused laugh emanates from the audience. Keep a secret from who? The whole world is watching.

“I feel quite sure of it,” assures Clover.

One hand pulls out a small, black box from the depths of pocket. The crowd gasps in astonishment, but Blake’s clueless as to its significance.

“I was waiting until I could go home to Blake a victor before I could ask her to marry me,” he says. The small case pops open to reveal a ring sitting in a white, cushioned interior.

The cameras barely linger on it before they shift to Blake, and then her own face is on the screen, mouth half open in a mix of surprise and something undecipherable, even to herself. She thinks she might recognize it as fear.

“I didn’t think I would ever be ready until I could come back and finally be something she deserved. A winner, a better man,” Adam confesses.

“You had such conviction in your devotion that you thought you could break District Four’s losing streak for her?” Clover asks, incredulous. 

Adam nods. “Of course. I love her.”

“And now?” probes Clover, gently. “What are your plans?”

“The same as before, even if they’ve changed a little,” Adam promises. “I never thought when I volunteered to compete in the arena that I would be doing it to keep Blake safe. But I know that District Four will have a winner this year.”

Adam gives a small smile, one with more modesty than he’s shown in his entire time in the Capitol so far. 

Clover waits patiently as he plucks the ring from its perch, and holds it up to him, to the audience.

“And she’ll have this to remember me by. I promise.”

Clover nods in sympathy, and claps him on the back. “Well, best of luck to you, Adam Taurus, and I think I speak for all of Panem when I say our hearts go with yours.”

***

There’s little else to do during the interviews than pay attention to scraps of information that the other tributes might reveal about their skill and strategy. It’s not like she has a direct line to either Mara or Dillon, nothing to whisper in their ears.

The boy from Three is short and acerbic with Clover. It makes her smile. She’d never gotten to speak with him the way she wants to now, to make him apologize for cementing her place in this city. He looks good -- his stylists have made sure to show his face this time, as well as quite a bit of the rest of him. Dangerous is the word that comes to mind at his appearance, dark skin covered in darker, thin scars, with bronze hair falling into his eyes. But neither his looks nor his words offer any clarification to Blake, and he leaves the stage and leaves her empty-handed.

Mara goes next, and she plays her role well — smart, likable, a confidence to mask her natural anxiety at the injury she’d confessed to Blake that emerges when the cameras are off. Then Dillon.

They gave him the sexy angle. It’s one that always makes her skin crawl, but he was eager for it, and Corsac was eager to indulge him, as much as both his mentors hate it.

She’d asked Tukson once how he could stand to let their tributes try to seduce their way into the audience’s pockets, knowing what they both know about being wanted in the Capitol. He’d acknowledged that he didn’t let them go if he thought they’d have any chance of winning.

(She’d asked if that meant he thought she’d lose, and he could only shrug, face crumpling, and Blake almost apologized for the question.)

She manages to stomach watching her tribute, and congratulates him backstage, and they take their seats to watch the rest. One by one, three-minute chunks roll by, until it’s District 12’s turn, and Yang’s sister takes her place on stage.

“Ruby Rose! Welcome!”

She shakes his hand politely. She’s not dressed in anything special, actually, and Blake frowns, looking for Coco’s touch in her appearance and finding none.

Ruby’s wearing a sweater as deeply red as her names, and simple black pants. Her short hair is cut and clean, but her tips now feature a dark gradient of red fading into the black in a way that reminds Blake of dying embers. It’s not something Coco would ever approve, edgy and young and bold. There’s not even a trace of make-up on her face, and she looks every one of her sixteen years next to Clover. 

She looks like the teenager she is.

“So, Miss Rose, what’s been your favorite part of the Capitol so far?” Clover starts with an easy one, smoothing his hand down his vest as he takes his seat.

“Meeting Penny,” Ruby answers immediately, and the speed of the reply gives Clover pause, used to coaxing answers out of his shy subjects and fielding rehearsed replies with practiced pauses from the ones that come prepared.

“Our Penny? From District Three?” he asks. 

Ruby nods, beaming, and Clover’s famous smile, a perfect set of white, gleaming teeth, wavers ever so slightly. The interviews are meant only to improve your own self-image. It’s rare that tributes mention each other at all on the stage, even in the rare context of alliances. 

There’s very little room for making friends.

Blake smiles, hers genuine. Already, Ruby’s knocked him off his rhythm.

“That’s tremendous. Inter-district cooperation and friendship! Without it, Panem couldn’t run!” Clover turns to a crowd made exclusively up of Capitol citizens, looking for consensus. They nod and whoop obediently. 

Blake knows as well as anyone that the Games are meant to keep them divided, at each other’s throats. Even the existence of the Careers divides people, she thinks, recalling to her first meeting with Yang, so filled with tension. Panem runs because the Capitol says jump, and the districts ask how high.

Ruby’s eyes pull together in concern at his comment and the crowd’s response, but Clover moves on: “Miss Rose, there was quite a passionate outburst from sister — and your district— at your reaping. You must be quite popular. Do they expect your timely return?”

“No, not at all,” she shakes her head. “The gesture was meant as a message for us. Would you like to know what it means?”

She’s trapped him with the question, and Blake smiles again. He can’t say no without denying the crowd their sated curiosity, without being explicitly rude.

Clover gives a gesture with his hand as if to give her the floor.

“It’s an old gesture in District 12. It means thank you. It means admiration. It means goodbye to someone you love. They made it at my mother’s funeral, too.”

Some of the crowd coos adoringly at first before falling silent at her last sentence. Clover’s startled for a moment before he recovers. “What do you think prompted that kind of reaction from the crowd?”

Ruby shrugs. “I don’t know. Ever since Yang was in her Games, they’ve sort of hated her.”

“Hate her?”

“Yes. For what they saw in the Games.”

“For what she did to Mercury Black, her district partner and ally?” he asks, reminding the crowd.

“For what they believe she did to him.”

Clover laughs uncomfortably. “I’m not sure of your meaning.”

“That’s okay,” she says, cooly.

“Your sister’s been tight-lipped about you from the beginning of her time in the Capitol, but it’s clear from her reaction at your reaping that you two are very close,” Clover says, trying to move onto more comfortable ground. “Tell me what it’s like to leave her again.”

Blake’s nails dig into her thigh. _This_ was what Ruby was reaped for. This is why she’s up for slaughter, to expose and exploit the bonds of family for the Capitol’s entertainment, for their consumption. And as a reminder, as always, to all twelve districts, that their children are for sale.

“It’s the hardest thing I’ll ever have to do,” Ruby says, voice small for the first time. The camera cuts to Yang waiting in the wings of the stage, her expression hardened and masked, like she knows they’ll point the cameras at her face. “I haven’t been able to talk about it with her. It’s been too hard.”

“Would it be easier, when she’s not in front of you? Could you say it now?” Clover asks, softly, voice full of the kind of sympathy that makes him seem trustworthy, safe. Ruby seems to know he’s not.

She takes a deep breath.

“Maybe,” she whispers.

A beat.

“I’d want to say thank you. I’d want to tell her that I love her, more than anyone. I’d tell her that I’m sorry, and that it’s not her fault. That it’s mine, and...”

“And..?”

“And yours,” she says, turning to the crowd, and Blake feels a chill run down her spine. 

Both Rose-Xiao-Long siblings have unusual eyes, but whereas Yang’s are such a lovely, ethereal lilac that have been on her mind for years, Ruby’s are now in full focus, with a look that could cut steel, stormy, silver irises reflecting clear, visceral contempt to the crowd.

It’s a look so at odds with how she’s seen Ruby act with Yang that Blake all but freezes until the camera changes. When they show her steely look in profile instead, the spell breaks.

Clover coughs, then laughs nervously. “Let’s talk about your training score. Eleven! Even your sister didn’t manage anywhere near that high,” he says, hurriedly. “Can you tell us what happened?”

“Um...” Ruby says, shyly, shifting back into her usual demeanor. She looks into the crowd, then up to the balcony. “I don’t think I’m allowed to talk about it.”

“She’s not!” shouts a Gamemaker from their booth. Ruby gives a pleased, innocent smile in response.

Clover makes an exaggerated, pained face, before sighing. “Well, in that case… you can at least tell us what you think your greatest strength in the arena will be. What’s your ace in the hole?”

Ruby thinks for a moment, swinging her legs a little like she has the entire interview, full of energy. There isn’t a part of her that isn’t moving, in a way that reminds Blake of Yang. These girls are two sides of the same coin of physicality.

“I’m pretty fast,” Ruby says. There’s a light in the corner of the stage that blinks to life, red and bright and obscene. She doesn’t have much time left before her interview ends. “Anyone who wants to kill me will have to catch me first.”

Ruby stops, and Blake feels it again, that moment from before, where something in Ruby’s voice and the look on her face command attention. Clover must feel it, too, because he starts to open his mouth to interrupt, but she’s too quick for him.

“Even Salem.”

#### **

Blake notices the bands on Sun’s arms when he gives up on his shirt entirely in the middle of their spar. He’s had a habit of unbuttoning the dress shirts Tifa keeps putting him in, but she’s clued in enough to finally give him a cut that’s especially flattering to the abs he likes to flaunt. 

He’s not a Career, but he’s here anyway. Seventeen years old, and the son of a victor Blake really only ever sees during formal events in District 4.

His father had won decades ago, then fled to the Capitol with his wife and newborn son a few years after. But his parents hadn’t been smart enough to have Sun in the capital city, so into the reaping bowl his name went, a citizen of the fishing district all the same. Regardless of the silver spoon in his mouth.

The Capitol likes to rig the reapings for the families of victors. It makes for better television. So he’d been plucked in his youth to compete, in place of the seventeen-year-old Career back home who’s cursing his name for taking away his chance at a crown. He doesn’t know yet that it’s a gift.

Sun had cried as openly as he’d laughed on the train from District 4. It hadn’t impressed the Career girl who came with him, and she’d asked to be coached separately almost immediately. 

But Blake had liked him right away. 

His tattoos are thick and black, bold lines overlapping together in intricate patterns around his upper arms. She’s immediately struck by their beauty, so much like the ornamental knotwork done in District 4 that she almost aches at the sight of them, a reminder of the home she’d left behind.

She lowers her training staff from its defensive position at her front. “What are those?” she asks. 

He follows her gaze to his arms before blinking back at her, throwing his shirt to the side. “My wedding bands, dummy,” he says, and he grabs his staff to try to take a cheap hit while her guard’s down. 

“You’re married?” 

He gets his easy strike in, but she’s too surprised by the words to even rub at the burn on her shoulder. 

It’s not unheard of to get pregnant tributes. Expecting mothers whose children are cut from them in every trimester before they set foot in the arena. But you don’t get a lot of married tributes. The teenagers of Panem aren’t intent on matrimony. 

“Hah! I got one. Maybe I do have a shot at this, huh?” Sun beams, moving to strike her again. Blake recovers in time to reset her feet and block him. “Yeah, I’m married.”

“To?” she presses, shoving him roughly backwards to keep him from stepping them forward. Too close to corner her against the wall.

“A boy named Neptune,” he says, feinting high to take a swipe at her knees. She rolls her eyes at the obvious misdirect, hopping over his weapon with ease before retaliating with a strike at his unguarded center, a soft _thwap_ against his abdomen. 

She makes a note of the way his skin is still slightly red around the band of black. “They don’t look very old. When did you get them?”

“Couple weeks ago,” Sun replies. She lets him freestyle by himself for a little bit, standing back as he twirls the staff theatrically on the mat. He alternates with a jab or two here and there, punctuated with a grunt.

“I thought there might be a good chance that this would be my last reaping, one way or the other, so… we just sort of went for it.”

So he’d known the Capitol was likely to pick him, she thinks. If only whoever had trained him had paid more attention to his combat and a little less on his physique. Though his body couldn’t hurt when securing him sponsors.

“I didn’t know that we had wedding tattoos,” Blake confesses. She’s seen them on others in District 4 before she’d left, though on none as young as Sun. She had thought they were merely decorative, with no hint at a deeper meaning. “Are they traditional?” 

“Shit, Belladonna. I didn’t even grow up in Four and I know they are.” He squints at her. “Yeah, of course. My parents got them for each other.”

“What about rings?” she asks. She fights to keep her hand from reaching up and grabbing the chain around her neck on instinct. 

“Rings?” Sun scratches his head, then drops his staff altogether, letting it clatter to the floor. “I don’t know what kind of sheltered life you’ve had, but no one in Four can really afford rings.”

He rolls forward on his elbows into a handstand, and starts walking upside-down along the mat. He looks downright simian now, complete with the dorky grin that stretches across his face.

“Are you talking about that bullshit story they tell about you? The Capitol one?” he asks. 

Blake matches each step of his hand with a step of a foot to walk with him. She’s too amused to take any real offense. 

“They only tell that here,” he grunts. There’s a little too much blood in his face now. “They think it’s romantic or whatever. But it’s not from Four. Didn’t your parents ever tell you about how they got hitched?”

“They’re dead,” she deadpans.

“Ah, well. I’d apologize, but I’m about to be, too, so. I’ll say hi for you.”

She tips him over.

Blake knows his death is the first one that will sting in a way that goes beyond the guilt of watching children so eager to kill die so soon.

He blows kisses to his boyfriend at home whenever the pre-Games cameras focus on him, tells him he loves him in every shot. He’s a crowd favorite at his interview, gregarious and outgoing and charming in a disarmingly earnest way.

She’s crying slightly when she shakes him awake the morning of his Games, and even under his exhaustion from what’s always a restless night for tributes, he smiles lopsidedly.

Sun tells her not to be sad, even as his voice cracks for them both.

Blake wants to make him promise to try, to try to win, and come home, for his husband. For her, even. She wants this one good thing to stay. But she knows the cost of playing, and so does he.

She’s seen the quiet focus he’s carried himself with, buried under the pep and bravado. She knows the tattoos that wrap around his arms were inked as a goodbye instead of a promise, a living memorial.

“Make them pay for it,” he winks, and then he’s gone, taken by the hovercraft. 

When Sun takes a bow and steps off the platform before the countdown finishes, there’s nothing left of him to send home. She tries not to retch when her eyes try to catch on the ground for a whorl of black ink, after he’s blown apart.

#### ***

Nothing tells Blake that Yang will be on the roof after the last of the interviews except for instinct, a tug deep in the depths of her soul. It’s not surprising when she steps out of the elevator on the top floor to her, pacing back and forth in the light rain, hood pulled up over her mess of blonde hair

By the nervous energy burning off of Yang, she almost expects the water to evaporate before it even hits her skin.

“Yang,” she calls, softly. Like she’ll spook. 

She freezes, looking up to meet her gaze. “Blake.”

Her eyes are wide with alarm. 

Blake takes a step towards her. “What happened?”

Yang’s at a loss, starting and stopping. “She came to the prep room already dressed. Refused to work with the prep team, or Coco.” Her voice is strained, creeping up in pitch. Not from pain. Just panic. “We went in with a plan, but she was so stubborn—I couldn’t tell her what to do. No one can, not when she gets like that.”

“You didn’t know what she would do?”

“I had a feeling,” Yang says bitterly. Her right arm is shaking, trembling, and Blake moves forward again to close the gap between them. 

“Yang,” she starts, and the sky flashes with the strike of lightning, bright against a rolling storm building towards them. “Ruby said it wasn’t your fault. What did she mean?”

“She thinks she got herself reaped,” she says, and then she jumps at the boom of thunder that shakes above them, and Blake aches to hold her. Yang lifts her hands to her face, balling them into fists against her temples.

“I don’t even know what she did! She won’t tell me!” she says. Yang’s slipping into an accent Blake’s never heard before, not at all like the Capitol speech. “They walked her back from the mines with _guns_ trained at her _head_ and they just—they just gave her _back_ and I—”

Yang cuts herself off, shaking her head. She can’t speak anymore. 

And then Blake’s mind is racing, thinking of Coco and the way she’ll be aligned with District 12 after this. Blake hadn’t meant to align herself with an iconoclast, hadn’t meant to pair her friend in something dangerous. She didn’t know that Ruby was just as much of a risk as her sister, only worse, intentional and deliberate in a way so much more damning than Yang’s ferocious, knee-jerk loyalty at her sister’s reaping.

“You could’ve said something sooner,” she says, irritation suddenly lining her words. “I didn’t know I was putting my friend on the line for a girl intent on pissing off the President.”

Yang’s eyes narrow, the comment pulling her out of her misery as she looks up at Blake. “Told you sooner? I didn’t even know you! How was I supposed to know that you’re apparently so desperate to help us?”

And it's obvious and loud between them suddenly, as deafening and disorienting as the sound of a cannon blast. This thing that Blake hasn’t allowed herself to feel until now, blooming impossibly to life in only a handful of days after years of cutting back any traces of growth.

A flash of guilt passes across Yang’s face before it hardens. She fumbles with her scroll, struggling to pull it from her pockets with her shaking hand. “It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing you can do that will fix this,” she says, caught between a snarl and a sob, pushing the screen into Blake’s hands.

Blake looks down at the tote board on the screen with a sinking heart, and the rain begins to pour in earnest now, fat drops hitting the scroll fast and hard. 

“Think you can figure what that means?” Yang snaps.

If you watch the Games like she does, closely, methodically, it’s not hard to spot the occasional tribute reaped as a retribution. She doesn’t have any way of knowing what for. A failure of a father to pay their share of taxes. The distribution of unsanctioned literature by an aunt or an uncle. War stories that fall too loosely from the lips of a grandmother. They’re the children whose deaths seem almost staged in the arena. Crushed by a boulder with just too much variation in its momentum. Set upon by mutts who are more intent on killing than maiming.

They’re not long shots or underdogs in anything other than their odds. You’d have to be insane to bet on someone the Capitol wants dead. People don’t sponsor the dead.

Ruby can try all she likes, but she can’t outrun the 50:1 next to her name.

When she looks up again, Yang’s wiping rain and teardrops from her face. Her shoulders sag, the fight gone out of her, like she can hardly hold herself together.

“Ruby knows what’s right,” she whispers. “Even when it’s hard. And she does it, without any concern for herself. Just like her mom. But Summer’s dead, and now Ruby’s as good as, and we _—_ ” Yang’s face crumples for the second time she’s ever seen, the same expression from Ruby’s reaping, “we should have ran, we should’ve _left—”_

Yang gasps for breath, and Blake can’t help but bring her hands up to cup her face. There’s no malice left in her. The girl who beat her Games with nothing more than her fists breaks in front of her, cracking open like the sky above them.

She knows Yang feels it too, now. The inexplicable tether between them. It’s in the way she can't help but lean forward into her, like Blake's her moon, like she's her tide. It was in the way she let her inside of her heart, to hold something precious between her hands. It was in the way she’d given Ruby to her to train before, a piece of her heart offered willingly, trust freely offered. The furthest thing from the enemies.

But there’s a dam between them, still. Blake can’t name it, as close as she is, as much as the feelings swirl into the shape of words, but Yang can’t follow her, can’t waste her time and attention on a second lost cause.

“I can’t remember what it’s like to not have a sister,” Yang whispers, hoarse and strangled. She leans her forehead into Blake’s and closes her eyes. “I don’t want to be an only child again.”

Yang’s brow furrows with something like resolve. “And I won’t be. I only played the Games to come back to Ruby. I won’t live in this world to be a mentor for the rest of my life.”

Blake hesitates. There’s a part of her that aches when she thinks of Ruby’s death, written out in front of her now like something permanent. But she’s spent enough time where Yang is now not to challenge it. And she’s spent enough time watching Ruby to know that the last thing she would want for her sister is to ever stop fighting. The rebuttal comes from her before she can stop herself:

“If Ruby doesn't come home, and you can offer her memory all the days and hours of your life..” she says, “and all you choose is more suffering, more pain”—Yang’s eyes snap open, fierce with something like betrayal—”that seems like an ugly way to pay the price of her life. And not like love at all.”

“And what do you know about love?” Yang demands.

When she can’t bring herself to answer out loud, Yang jerks away. The string of tension connecting them stretches taut as she leaves her in the rain, but it doesn’t snap.

*

“I just think it would be better if we had some allies to start with,” Blake tries to say, voice hesitant, pleading. 

“And I’ve told you that we don’t need them,” he says, running his hand through her dark hair in the dead of night, two days before the start of the Games. “Don’t you trust me to keep you safe, my love?”

She’s quick to backtrack. “No! I’m not saying that I—I don’t know.”

“I get scared when it feels like you don’t believe in me,” Adam admits, pressing his lips to the hollow of her throat, humming gently when she shivers in response.

“I never said I didn’t,” she manages, and she can feel his smile against her skin.

“We don’t need anyone else, Blake. We never have.”

#### ***

Everything has a price in the Capitol, which means that everything is for sale. Even information. The only dealer Blake had ever heard of was a woman buried underneath the city, miles and miles below the earth, a nuclear shelter repurposed into a trader’s den.

Back in the early days in her role as a mentor, Sienna had warned her that Jinn would always ask for a price too high, and told her to be prepared to pay it. Frankly, the offhand remark Sienna had made about a rumor that the woman used to be the President’s lover was more of a threat than anything else. Blake had avoided coveting her services ever since.

But she steps into the elevator that will take her to Jinn anyway, waved through by a security guard who takes her scroll and sweeps her clothing for recording devices.

When the elevator slows to a stop, the doors open to reveal a small, dark room with shining black walls, white fluorescent lights bouncing mirrored reflections across each surface in ladders of illumination.

Blake’s not prepared for the stark, blue skin of the woman in front of her, lounging languidly splayed across a leather settee in the center of the floor. Nor is she prepared for the sheer amount of blue skin on display. She quickly brings her gaze to the woman’s eyes instead, ears burning.

What’s the point of wearing bangles around your wrists when nothing else is covered?

“Blake Belladonna,” she says, in a low, almost musical tone. It washes over her with a considerable amount of somber, redolent and deep.

The hairs on her arm begin to prickle, standing up on end in the same way they’d stood in District 4 in the depths of summer as mosquitoes had landed on her skin. Out for blood.

“Is there something I can help you with?” Jinn asks, draping an arm behind her back, and Blake’s eyes flick to the wall behind her in flustered annoyance when the motion stretches the skin of her chest.

“You’re Jinn?” she manages.

“I am,” she replies.

“I’m told you trade in information.”

“I do,” she says, an amused smile playing at her lips.

“Then I need you to tell me what the arena is like for the Games this year,” she pleads.

Jinn shifts again, sitting up to rest her chin in her hand, staring curiously at Blake. “Why now? You’ve never come to me before. Always clever enough to figure it out for yourself.”

Blake tries not to shiver at the implication, increasingly aware of the imbalance of power in the room. She may be a victor, but Jinn has been watching her from the moment she was reaped. Maybe even before.

“There’s something different about the Games,” she says. “The betting markets aren’t making any sense either. If my tributes are going to have an advantage, they need it now.” She locks eyes with Jinn. “I can pay.”

Jinn laughs, shaking her head. “Sienna should’ve told you that your money isn’t good here, Belladonna. It’s worthless when it all comes from the city, regardless of how many accounts you feed it through. All of it can be traced.” Jinn raps her gold-covered fingers against one smooth, cerulean cheek. “Besides, I don’t need it.”

“I don’t have anything else,” Blake says, desperation and danger creeping in equal measure into the edges of her consciousness. She’s never been this far underground before, and she’s starting to feel trapped.

“Don’t you?” Jinn says patiently. “I trade in information — are you sure you don’t have anything to sell?”

Blake wracks her mind, flipping through all of the things she has to confess. If there’s anything of value, anything at all. But when she tries to think of secrets, all that comes to mind are unvoiced desires, hidden feelings, a pair of lilac eyes. She blinks them away.

“My tributes,” she starts instead, grasping on Mara’s injury. “The girl has a—”

Jinn puts up a hand to silence her. “I have everything I need about the pair from Four.” The corners of her mouth curl upward in a knowing smirk. “Why don’t you tell me about the girl from Twelve?”

“Ruby?” she asks skeptically. 

“Either one,” Jinn says airily.

“Why are you interested in them?” Blake asks. The mention of the sisters has her immediately on the defensive.

“Why are you?” she throws back. “It was certainly generous to give them Coco Adel and Yatsuhashi Daichi as stylists.”

Blake feels exposed as well as cornered. The best move she thinks she can make is to keep silent and still.

Jinn hums knowingly. “But now Ruby’s gone and made quite a mess of the lead you tried to hand her, hasn’t she. Tell me, do you think Yang will ever look your way again if one of your tributes kills her sister?”

Blake’s breath catches in her throat, and she feels the same rush of anger she felt in the apartment of District 4. The adrenaline dripping into her blood sharpens the room around her into a crisp clarity, time slowing down while her heart speeds up. 

She wonders briefly how fast she could choke Jinn with the golden chains hanging from her wrists—

“There, that suits you.” 

Jinn’s voice pulls at her attention, breaking her from the trance. She’s looking at her appreciatively, something like respect, and it’s the most unsettling thing so far. “That’s the look of a fighter. Your mentors should’ve seen it sooner.”

“This was a waste of time,” she forces out between grit teeth, turning to leave

“Wait,” Jinn calls. “I’ll give you something for free.”

Blake stays in place. She doesn’t want to be indebted to this woman, but she has little choice if she wants to keep Ruby—

If she wants to keep her tributes safe.

“What’s the catch?” she asks.

Jinn hums again. “Do you know why the Capitol loves an underdog, Blake? It’s because _they_ were the original underdogs — one city-state against all of the districts in the first rebellion. And the Capitol still came out on top.”

“But they’re not the fighters they think they are. In a dogfight between thirteen districts and the Capitol, they’re evenly matched.”

“Twelve districts,” Blake corrects.

“If you say so.” Jinn says politely. She takes out a slip of paper and a pen, and begins to write. “Sienna was right to think a simple spark could ignite Panem. It might’ve worked, if her gambit hadn’t been doomed from the start.”

She looks up at Blake while she folds her note closed. “But perhaps victory can be found in the simpler things. A smaller, more honest soul.”

“For someone who deals in information, you’re not very candid when you speak,” Blake says, her mind racing. 

“I won’t give you anything about the Games. Not when you’re only a few hours away from putting it together,” Jinn says, cutting off the sharp protest at the tip of Blake’s tongue by standing with intention. She holds out the note for her to take. “But I can give you this to help Miss Xiao Long when the time comes, if you so choose.”

Blake keeps the note folded, unread, all the way back to the Training Center. It burns a hole in her pocket. She’s not even sure how she would approach a conversation with Yang at all, after how their last went. As much as they seem to gravitate towards each other, there’s still a chasm between them. One that Yang can’t ask her to cross, in the way no one has before.

But like in all things, Yang surprises her, this time by inviting her to the rooftop with a cryptic message on her scroll, pinging right before she steps onto the fourth floor.

She’s still distracted when she steps out onto the roof to see Weiss, Ruby, Oscar, and Yang, all waiting expectantly for her. Their heads snap towards her when the elevator doors open, and her eyes meet Yang’s automatically. She feels her heart skip a traitorous beat, and then pushes forward to greet them.

#### **

What’s left of Adam fits in a box barely the length of her forearm.

Sienna brings him to her a year before the start of the 73rd Hunger Games, rapping on her apartment door in the Capitol in the early morning of a late spring.

“Put some decent shoes and a thick coat on,” she says, cardboard tucked under one arm.

People rarely leave the Capitol proper, but it’s surrounded on almost all sides by mountain ranges, with tips of sprinkled snow and ridges of lush, dense forest. The people of the Capitol prefer to look and not touch, in the same way they preferred the districts to look and not touch at the land outside their district’s borders, on the other side of electrified border fences.

If Blake’s honest, she’d confess she feels the same, if only because her body refuses to adjust to the sharp difference in temperature between here and Four.

Instead, she lets the cool air of the morning sting in the back of her nose, following Sienna silently on a hike up a mountain towards the south.

They pass through a portion of forest that thins out to reveal the bank of a perfectly calm lake, a modest beach of smooth, round stones between the treeline and the water.

Sienna tosses Blake the cardboard box of ashes, before kicking off her shoes to dip in the icy water. 

“I didn’t know you had these,” she says quietly, staring down at the sticker on one side.

 _Adam Taurus – District 4_ is printed inside of a neat, white square across the top, in faded black ink.

She’d never thought about where they took him, after. The hovercraft had taken them both when she won – she’d refused to leave his side. The doctors had pulled her away from him after that, sedating her to treat the deep laceration above her hip, bleeding freely.

“Well, I wasn’t about to let them give his body to a fourteen-year-old girl,” Sienna says, and Blake blinks in confusion. “You were his only next of kin,” she explains. “I took him to be cremated. He’s been in the back of my closet ever since.”

Sienna falters for a moment before she starts again. “I figured this would be as good a place as any. I didn’t think you would want him in Four.”

“No,” she says at once. “No. He wanted to be here. Let him stay.”

Sienna nods, eyes closing as she digs her feet into the mud, thick swirls of silt rising to the surface.

“Why are you here, Sienna?” Blake presses. They’re not here just to scatter ashes she could’ve just as easily poured down the drain. Sienna’s rarely reticent so much as she’s careful with her words when she thinks she can be overheard.

It’s a rare opportunity to discuss things openly, this far outside of the borders of Panem. The virtually silent hike here and the long pauses Sienna’s taking unsettle her. The woman who had kept her alive for the worst two weeks of her life is suddenly anxious to speak. Not in front of the Capitol, but in front of her.

“When you and Adam came to be trained as Careers,” Sienna starts, “I had spent fifteen years in the Capitol and ten working for the rebellion.”

She barely has time to process the revelation that a rebellion exists at all, much less that Sienna had worked for them, before her mentor continues.

“When I won the Games, I thought I was untouchable, just as I had my entire life as a Career. I didn’t realize what winning would mean.” Sienna’s eyes close. Her face is pained, like a phantom ache is flaring back to life. “I made the choice to refuse Salem when she asked of me what I told you she would ask of you, so she had my family killed.” 

Blake could only gape. The Khans had died in a tragic accident, but she’d never dreamed that it was intentional. She feels impossibly foolish at her own naivety. 

“The rebellion came to me and offered me an opportunity for revenge in my capacity as a mentor and a victor,” Sienna continues. “I was eager to take it. I fed them information about my tributes every year, and kept my eyes and ears open to trickles of news about small pockets of unrest in Four. But it wasn’t enough for me.”

“When Adam first came to be trained as a Career, we’d had a dry spell of victors for so long that we were no longer pulling in the same kind of sponsors we used to in the Capitol. Each year without a win made it harder to bring a tribute home.” 

“Adam was arrogant,” she admits. “But for all of his hubris, he understood that the other Careers would have advantages in the arena that would undo him if he didn’t have help.”

And Adam had never had any intention of losing, Blake thinks.

“He approached me with a love story. He insisted they’d root for both of you if you were both reaped in the same year. Two tributes, desperately unlucky and tragically romantic.”

“He was strong and handsome, and you were young and beautiful,” Sienna admits, helpless. “I thought if I could keep you both alive until the end, then I could get Panem to fall in love with both of you. If either of you were to die, it would be a violence more senseless than it ever had been. I thought that I could light the flames of revolution.”

Blake can’t look at her. Sienna’s words come to her as if she’s underwater, muted and quiet. Apprehension is building in the parts of her body she can still feel, and she wants to cry out for her to stop, to prevent the blow that would come next.

“I had Fennec read your name at the reaping, and I had Adam volunteer,” Sienna confesses.

Something in Blake shatters, and dread seeps into the cracks left behind, holding her together in a loose frame of misery.

Sienna laughs, bitter and quiet, and she shakes her head. “But I was blinded by my own ambition. I realized what Adam was too late. You were already in the arena. His plan was working, and mine wasn’t.”

She reaches over to brush away a tear Blake hadn’t realized was tracking slowly down her face. “I sent you to the slaughter for nothing at all,” Sienna apologizes, voice breaking.

“I never asked,” Blake hears herself say. “Why you sent me the kusarigama.”

Sienna’s face is full of shame when she responds. “I couldn’t leave you on your own.”

“Why didn’t it work?” Blake chokes out. “I thought— I thought we were _convincing_.”

The betrayal that’s sliding deeper into her back, sharp, aching, devastating— it might’ve been easier to bear if it had all been worth it. If they had made a difference. If it had mattered at all.

Sienna’s other hand reaches up to cup Blake’s face with both hands, thumbs stroking along her cheeks. It’s the first time she’s ever touched her like this, gentle and comforting. Blake almost wishes she could feel it, but her body feels frozen, empty, hollow. She feels a thousand miles away.

“Do you remember the way they looked at you, during your Victory Tour?” Sienna asks.

She did, though the memories were faded now, awash in a blur of trauma and time. Blake had struggled to understand why most of the districts seemed to look at her with pity instead of disgust for what she’d done. Sienna had never answered, aloof and indifferent, though Blake thinks now that her apathy had been saturated with guilt, just like her touch is now.

“You asked me why the family of the boy you killed in District Six didn’t seem to hate you,” Sienna continues. “I wasn’t brave enough to tell you that Adam treated you like you belonged to him before you were ever reaped.”

Sienna’s eyes burn as they stare into hers.

“I couldn’t tell you that the districts know the difference between love and possession.”

When Blake pulls away from her, she tears open the top of the box in her hands and stands next to the rocky shore.

She pours the ashes into the shallow of the lake. There’s no breeze to scatter him, and they sit lifeless as the tide pulls gently back and forth, stuck at the bottom of the water. 

#### ***

“Okay, so what are all of the things that we know for sure?” asks Blake, not for the first time. She resists the urge to roll her eyes; getting the group in front of her to focus instead of devolving into fights has been no small challenge. 

They’re all sitting on the raised wooden walkway that wraps around the rooftop garden, five figures hidden in the tall grasses and bamboos. Oscar’s asleep — his head’s resting against Ruby’s shoulder after closing his eyes for ‘just a moment’. He looks young and boyish, with the same sweet look on his face he has when he’s awake. 

“We know that Fox is blind, thanks to Penny,” Ruby chirps. And this was the revelation that had brought them all together tonight. The girl from District 3 had confessed the truth about her district partner to Ruby, and Ruby had brought it back to Weiss, who had brought it back to Yang — apparently, the sisters were having trouble speaking to each other after Ruby’s stunt — who had contacted Blake.

All with the hope of deciphering the significance of Fox Alistair’s position as the favorite in the betting markets. She understands the desperation. Blake is their only real lifelines, now that Ruby’s sabotaged her own chances in exchange for the fatal prize of defiance.

“We know that a significant number of Gamemakers have been replaced this year, which usually precedes a novel structure for the Games,” says Weiss.

“And we know that Ruby painted a target on her own back,” Yang says, twisting a handful of green off of the nearest plant to throw with deadly precision at her sister’s face. Yang can’t keep the bitterness, the hurt, from her voice, though she tries to pass the gesture off as playful.

“Blake, what else do you know about Fox?” Yang asks, turning to her while Ruby spits lanceolate leaves from her mouth. 

She shrugs. “He’s the son of some rich engineer in District Three. I don’t think he’s formally trained. He has no reason to be. His family isn’t affiliated with the Games at all.”

“Anyone with that much money has access to decent medical care. If they couldn’t restore his vision, he’ll have been given something to compensate with,” Weiss notes, reaching up to rub the scar over her eye in an unconscious gesture.

“Penny says he has a little device in his ear that helps him see, kind of. It sends out sonar pulses,” Ruby offers.

“Echolocation,” Blake says. “Like dolphins.”

“Like bats,” Yang corrects. “I don’t know what a fucking dolphin is.”

Ruby frowns, helpless to scold her sister’s language without jostling Oscar on her shoulder. She looks at Weiss pleadingly, who obediently reaches out to flick Yang’s right ear. 

“But that still doesn’t help us,” Blake points out, trying to keep them all on track while hiding a smile. “You’re not allowed to use any kind of technology, unless it’s a prosthetic like Yang’s. Even then, they’re replaced with models the Capitol prepares before you enter the arena, after a kid somehow turned his arm into a gun for the 48th Games.”

Ruby tries not to look impressed, and they’re all gracious enough to pretend not to notice. 

“So he’ll still be blind in the arena,” Yang says. 

“Not necessarily,” Ruby counters, eyes taking on an unusual focus. “His perception of sound would still be much better than mine if he’s used it for most of his life instead of his sight. If he’s been using noise to navigate well enough to fool everyone here for this long, he’ll be able to do the same in the arena.” 

Blake looks at Yang for an explanation, who only shrugs. She hopes Ruby’s grasp on the special senses is more sophisticated than her theories on bone healing. 

“That doesn’t answer the question of why it’s enough of an advantage in the first place to disproportionately affect his odds,” Weiss says, impatient. 

“Weiss is right. How is any of this relevant?” Blake sighs and rubs at her forehead. There are only three days until the start of the Games, and she’s spent the last few nights running on a minimal amount of sleep. This shouldn’t be as difficult as it is — it feels simple, like she should already know. “Yang, do you remember it ever being truly dark in the arena? I can’t remember ever being in a position where I couldn’t at least see by the light of the moon, or the stars.”

“No, I always had light,” says Yang, frowning in thought. “It was never really black until I got far enough into the cave.”

“A cave,” Blake repeats, disparate pieces of a puzzle dropping clumsily into place in the back of her mind. She pulls up a list of the Gamemakers in a press release from half a year ago on her scroll, and passes it to Ruby. “Is there anyone on this list you recognize?”

She scans it briefly, before looking up at Blake and nodding. “Yeah. Tyrian Callows.”

Blake’s heart starts to sink. “The director?” 

“Yeah,” Ruby brightens slightly. “Have you seen any of his movies?”

Blake shakes her head. There’s a moment before a bad wave hits, when you’re too close to the surface underwater. You think you can escape its weakening pull, before it starts again, stronger than it ever was. It tugs at every part of you until you’re being flipped over and over. She feels the wave start to build. “What are his best ones?” 

Ruby opens her mouth to answer before she stops in her tracks, gears in her mind turning the same way Blake’s are. “Horror,” she finally answers, shrinking back into herself. She’s never looked small to Blake before, never scared, but she’s starting to now.

Yang glances between them, confusion in her eyes. “Wait, what?”

Weiss frowns as it hits her, too. “The Gamemaker in charge of editing this year is a filmmaker known for his ability to effectively capture fear and suspense. Additionally, the only situation that justifies Mister Alistair’s favor with the betting markets are ones where the arena would have to be completely devoid of light. Tunnels, caves, an enclosed maze. Anything where sound can travel, and light won’t.”

“My Games were a romance,” Blake says.

Ruby’s brows pull together, silver eyes dark in comprehension. “And mine will be a horror story.”

Yang looks shell-shocked.

“So whoknows?” Weiss pushes. “Does Fox?”

“No,” Ruby shakes her head. “I don’t think either of them know, otherwise their mentors would’ve told them both, right? And Penny would’ve told me. I know she would’ve.” Ruby shifts uncomfortably, and the movement brushes more of her loose bangs into her eyes. “Can I tell Penny?” she asks, voice small.

“If you think she won’t tell anyone else,” Yang says, voice hoarse.

A memory of walking the halls of the training center comes back to Blake: tributes from District 1 in blindfolds, trying to feel their way into attacks. “Cinder knows,” she admits, uncomfortable. 

The idea of Cinder’s Careers training for this from the beginning from the start is sobering enough to bring them all to silence for a moment, imaginations filling in the space that’s left with terror instead. Blake’s glad Oscar’s asleep.

“So that’s the pair from One, us, Penny, and then the pair from Four,” Weiss finally counts.

Blake starts at that. “Four?” she asks, perplexed.

“That’s you, genius,” Yang nudges her, but the rib is hollow, sapped of humor, leaving only a skeleton of exhaustion.

She looks at all of them for a moment. Blake can’t help but picture Dillon grabbing Ruby from behind in the dark, slitting her throat. Can’t help but picture Mara stealing Oscar away in the black, to dash his head against a rock.

“Right,” she says, though she realizes with a quiet confidence that she has no intention of breathing a word to her tributes. The chasm between her and District 12 has narrowed, the ground beneath her feet moving to bring her right up to the second cliff face, only inches between them. It would only take a step to cross.

“That’s me.”

#### *

They’re down to the final eight. Both Careers from District 1 are left, the rest a scattering from the outer districts. Blake wonders who they’re interviewing at home to mark the culling of the field down to its current handful of survivors. Neither she nor Adam have anyone left. 

He’s done what he’s promised. Adam’s kept her safe. They’ve done their best to give a convincing performance, and their mentors have rewarded them in spades for it. Blake’s getting better at knowing when Adam’s lying for the cameras. 

When Roman Torchwick announces the rule change, Adam’s elated. Genuinely. The prospect of them both surviving the arena makes him giddy and reckless, and she has to work to remind him to be quiet as he stumbles through the forest with an arrogance that threatens to betray their locations. 

If the odds are in their favor, she thinks, Blake might get to keep him. They’ve always been together, she reminds herself. Nothing’s changed. But there’s something suddenly unsettling about the idea of returning to the Capitol with him, and she’s struggling to keep a smile on her face for the audience.

The final silver parachute comes a day later, under the cover of darkness. There’s a weapon delicately wrapped in the cloth. It’s a wicked blade, shorter than a typical sword, and lightly curved, forged from a lightweight, black metal. A thick, rippling ribbon is attached to its base, and the other end extends into a small grip for her hand. 

Adam frowns at it in mild disgust. It’s not a weapon he can use. “Must be for you,” he says, turning to take stock of the rest of their supplies. 

A small, printed note sits at the bottom of the cloth, same as with every gift they’ve received so far. Blake reaches for it, and reads the words written on the scrap of paper before whipping her head back around to look at Adam, brows knitting together in concern.

_Don’t let him out of your sight_

_\- Sienna_

#### ***

Her scroll dings with a message, and she reaches for it blearily in the dead of the night.

She and Sienna don’t talk much anymore. Outside of nods in public, both seem to prefer their distance. 

Still, there’s a part of her that will always tie her instruction to her survival, a gut response conditioned by a handful of weeks when the only thing that seemed to separate her from life and death were Sienna’s words. So it’s only habit when she opens the message on her scroll. 

It’s a video clip from Ruby’s reaping. When she taps play, Blake sees it all over again. Different angles than the ones she’d seen live. The full extent of Yang’s attack is breathtaking — the first strike she makes connects smoothly with the jaw of the first Peacekeeper who tried to keep her from Ruby. He drops instantly, and Yang moves on, a maelstrom of violence, even after the first baton cracks against her cheek. 

And then she’s watching District 12 again, watching them press their fingers to their lips to the pair of sisters, as one stands on the stage while the other disappears, unconscious and bleeding, through the doors of the Justice Building rising darkly behind the platform. 

There’s text that follows, below the frame:

_They know the difference._

The light next to Sienna’s name blinks off. 

#### **

“We’ve been doing this together for five years, and I still don’t know how you can choose,” Blake remarks wearily to Tukson as he reappears in the doorway. He steps over the threshold with a fresh cup of coffee and a brow a few fractions of an inch deeper than it had been before he’d left. 

All the cameras tracking their tributes are fed back onto the monitors in this room, as well as the main feed being broadcast to the country. It’s Tukson’s observation booth -- Blake’s only ever been in hers once, in the rare year where her tributes had asked to be coached separately. 

The Career gang this year had splintered early, broken ranks stemming from a hot-heated tantrum thrown by the boy from District 1. Their tributes weren’t immune to the tension, splitting from each other in time with all the rest. It was a stark reminder of how much like children they all still were.

Tukson had walked out of the room to try to drum up sponsors for their female tribute the moment she’d separated from the boy. The speed of the decision had caught in her mind until he returned, but he’s contemplative, slow to respond. 

Three of the screens track their girl, and they both watch as she starts to set up camp against the rock face of a high cliff, giving her a vertical advantage to scan the landscape underneath her. It’s the kind of strategy that favors her bow and arrow. 

“Do you think we should send her string for a tripwire?” Tukson asks, peering at the topographical map of the arena, wary of her vulnerability in one of the most conspicuous peaks.

Blake does a mental inventory of her supplies for a moment before replying. “Anyone following her will have a hard time scaling to the mountain without making a little noise. But it’s your call.”

The comment seems to irk him, and he’s silent. Blake almost thinks he’s ignoring her until he opens his mouth to give his answer, flippant and frustrated, spoken with his back turned. 

“I have to choose because you refuse to, Blake,” he says, annoyed.

She blinks. He’s never been short with her before, and the rebuke makes her start to shrink back, the ghost of a habit born of years spent with raised voices and raised hands. “What do you mean?” she asks. 

Tukson turns to face her, irritation pulling his features into something more feral than she’s ever seen from him, years of unvoiced objections bubbling to the surface. 

“All of it. Everything! Leaving Four, keeping yourself here. Closing yourself off from anyone you could start to care about,” Tukson snaps, then sighs, reaching up to rub his eyes, days of sleepless nights staining the hollows of his face darker and darker. 

A flare of protest builds in her throat. “Sienna told me that if I ever—”

“Since when has anyone ever cared about what Sienna thinks, outside of the people in this city?” he questions, exasperated. “Aren’t you living proof of that?”

“What’s this about, Tukson? What did I do?”

“Nothing! You don’t _do_ anything. You don’t _decide_ anything. All you do is run from having to make any meaningful choices about what you want to do with the rest of your life.” His sideburns are starting to blend in with the stubble of his unshaven beard. 

“Do I wish that I didn’t have to come here, year after year? Of course I do. Do I wish that there weren’t any Games at all? Absolutely! Everyone does!” he says, and Blake’s eyes widen at his boldness, at the unfiltered nature of his words in a Capitol room she knows is full of microphones. He catches her expression, and shakes his head again in dismay.

“That’s the _point,_ Blake! It’s not rebellious to say it!” he says, gesturing around himself as if speaking to his hidden audience. “Let them hear it! We’re meant to hate it!”

He leans forward to meet her, and his voice softens. “But you’re punishing yourself just as much as they’re trying to punish you. I thought that when you first came home to Four that you could start to heal, but Sienna came and scared you off just when you took your first steps. And now it’s not just Adam’s shadow you’re living under.”

When Blake’s hands automatically reach for the chain at her neck at the mention of Adam’s name, Tukson’s eyes dart towards the practiced motion. 

“You keep that ring around your neck like it’s a noose you’re waiting to hang yourself with,” he says, reaching forward to gently pull her arms away. He takes her hands into his own. “You’re so insistent on playing the part they wrote for you that you don’t know who you are anymore.”

“So who am I, Tukson?” she says tiredly.

“You’re the girl who chose to live. The princess chose to die. So why are you still acting like it has any power over you?”

He squeezes her hands gently, and the difference between his touch and Sienna’s is suddenly striking. There’s no guilt on his face, no trace of shame in the way his thumbs brush over her knuckles. Only concern, and reproach. She doesn’t like to be touched anymore. Too many hands have sought her skin for only their own indulgence. For her forgiveness. But Tukson’s love is selfless, so much like a father’s that she doesn’t want to let go.

“The Games make every player a monster, then rob all but the victors a chance of redemption,” he says, urgent. “I’ll spend the rest of my life making up for what I did in the arena. To make sure I don’t waste the lives I took. But that’s the evil of death -- it puts an end to any hope of change.”

“We all lose the Hunger Games. But you still won your life. Don’t let them take it from you.”

#### ***

It’s almost noon. Blake’s spent most of her morning with her tributes; being two days away from the arena means that she’s been fielding constant questions about strategy, combat, sponsors. It’s enough to make her sleep-deprived head spin as well as throb, a dull ache in her temples. 

Her scroll dings with a message, and she feels her stress dissipate in response when she pulls it out of her pocket to read it. She has fifteen minutes to meet Yang in the mentor’s lounge downstairs. 

When she steps into the room, Yang’s waiting for her at the bar. The place is mostly empty, save for a few regulars — victors with lines of morphling hooked into their arms or drinks in their hands slumped in chairs along the walls, eyes glazed with attempts to drown their waking nightmares.

But Yang’s eyes are bright and clear, and her fingers drum against the counter with unrestrained excitement. 

“What’s got you in such a good mood?” Blake asks, sliding next to her. It’s infectious

Yang flashes her a dazzling grin, then taps the counter, gesturing to the bartender. “Can I get two Sunflower Pops?” 

“Sunflower Pops?” Blake asks.

“Ruby and I drink them on special occasions. Birthdays, the last day of the school year,” she explains. “They’re good, trust me. And all the caps come in different colors! Ruby used to beg me to give her all of mine.”

The corners of Blake’s mouth turn upwards — in truth, she’d trust Yang with anything. “So what are we celebrating?”

“Ruby has sponsors,” Yang beams. 

“What? How?” she blinks.

“That’s the thing,” Yang marvels, shaking her head and opening her scroll. 

Blake uses the distraction to stare at her while she taps away at the screen. The blood leaching into Yang’s cornea has faded almost completely now, with only the barest hints of red receding into her eyelid. The bruise high on her cheek is still healing, but it does nothing to mar her beauty in Blake’s eyes. 

“They’re all from the other districts,” Yang continues, sliding her scroll on the counter. “Weiss is vetting them now, but look!”

Her inbox is full of messages offering their support of Ruby. Some names she recognizes from her time in the Capitol, a handful of district transplants like she is. Others, she knows only from a distance, people of note and stature in Districts 3, 6, 8, 9, 11. The rest she doesn’t know — communities offering support, individuals whose names are completely new to her. 

“Do you know why?” Blake asks, flicking through what must be a dozen messages from this morning alone. She thinks she already knows the answer, Sienna’s message burning in her mind alongside Jinn’s note, unfolded and refolded, its contents committed to memory. 

It’s not overwhelming. The funds promised are small, paltry, cobbled together by smaller members of the districts, but they’re a start, an unlikely pledge of allegiance from Panem.

“No, I have no idea,” Yang exclaims, reaching over to point out the most exciting prospects, her voice rising in pitch. Blake tries not to laugh at the way Yang’s emotions have her starting to slip into that drawl she heard on the night of Ruby’s interview, swallowing vowels and adding consonants where they don’t belong as she talks. She’s infinitely pleased that this time it comes from glee rather than grief. 

The bartender sets two chilled bottles in front of them. Blake twists around to look for a bottle opener before Yang swipes a bottle dramatically, pulling her attention back.

“Allow me,” she says with a wink. 

Blake laughs, eyeing Yang’s considerable musculature with no sense of propriety but no small amount of disbelief. “Okay, even you can’t twist open a cap with your hands—”

Yang takes the bottle and props the lip of the cap over the bar counter. The heel of her palm comes down in one smooth, firm strike, and it pops off the rim. She slides the opened bottle to her before reaching for the second, grinning ear to ear.

“Where’s the faith?” she says, and the second cap comes off, same as the first.

Blake rolls her eyes. She slips out of her chair to reach for the discarded caps on the floor. There are two, one a rich yellow, a deep, almost golden coat of paint. The second is a gentle lavender. Each one is inscribed with the brand name on the surface, in an energetic, looping font. It’s ridiculous to say about a pair of bottle caps, but the colors look like they belong together in her hand, and she’s almost reluctant to give them away.

She holds them up to Yang, each balanced on a finger. “For Ruby’s collection,” she says. “Something to come back to when she wins.” 

Yang’s eyes narrow almost imperceptibly as Blake says “when” instead of “if”. She doesn’t comment, but her face softens, smiling ever wider. “No, you get one, too. I can’t take both.”

“I can’t choose,” she confesses. She’s already made her most important choice. 

Yang taps her chin, thoughtful. “Go with the purple. It seems like your color.”

Blake flicks the yellow cap off her thumb in Yang’s direction, who catches it with a deft hand. She tucks the purple cap into her pocket, and picks up the bottle to clink against Yang’s, held out to cheer. 

The drink is cool, carbonated, refreshing. There’s a hint of tang to mix with an almost sickly sweet, and she can imagine the two sisters younger than they are now, untouched by the Games, eager for a hit of sugar.

What neither Blake nor Yang could have anticipated is that the odds don’t have to be in your favor. They weren’t for a soot-stained seventeen-year-old from District 12, matched against the finest killers the districts had to offer with nothing but her fists. They weren’t for a fourteen-year-old orphan from District 4, whose death had been planned from the very beginning.

Sometimes you just defy them.

Soon, she’ll take Yang up to the garden on the roof for the first time in the daylight. She’ll be mindful of the flowers, pulling the girl towards the edge.

She knows they’re on camera, even if they can’t be heard, but she won’t be able to stop herself from reaching up on her toes to press her lips against Yang’s, tasting of sweet tang and possibility, of choice and danger, though for once she’ll feel no fear. 

She’ll pull away, and both of them will stumble over their words, blushes high on their cheeks. Blake will pull Jinn’s paper from her pocket, next to a purple bottle cap, and explain the seeds of dissent Ruby’s coaxed to life. She’ll tell her how the name written in black ink will put them in contact with Maria Calavera, the leader of the rebellion within the Capitol, the only person who might be capable of staying Salem’s hand when Ruby’s in the arena.

She’ll close her eyes when Yang kisses her again. Her fingers will curl into the soft collar of Yang’s jacket while a metal palm cups the back of her neck, warm and smooth. Her touch will feel like sunshine on her skin. 

But for now, after a few sips of her bottle, Blake sets the Sunflower Pop down on the bar. She rests her head against her hand, leaning forward enough into Yang’s space to see the streak of freckles painted across her nose, close enough to hear her breathing catch in her throat. 

“I think I owe you a dance, Xiao Long.”

#### *

Adam’s no more than a few yards away from her when the cannon blasts, his sword still embedded in the chest of the Career boy from District 1.

When he turns to grin at her, the third-degree burn on his face is still raw and weeping. She can see the sickly yellow-white bone of his eye socket underneath the exposed flesh.

It’s over, now. It’s over.

His left eye is half obscured, glassy and pale pink. There’s no trace of brilliant blue — the red-hot heat from the fire Miltiades had pressed his face into had eaten entirely through the outer layer of cornea, destroying his iris. Blake wonders how he can stand to keep it open before she realizes that the lid has melted into his skull, giving half his face a permanently startled expression, one eye forever wide.

He tugs his sword out and starts to move towards her, before the speakers rumble to life again, the Head Gamemaker’s voice sending his head turning in the direction of where the sound comes from, high in the sky.

It hides the way she steps backwards in fear, eyes fixed only on him.

“Greetings to the final contestants of the 68th Hunger Games. The earlier revision has been revoked. Closer examination of the rule book has disclosed that only one winner may be allowed,” Roman Torchwick says. “Good luck and may the odds be ever in your favor.”

Later, when Clover plays this back for her, head tucked into her knees and hands pressed over her ears, they’ll talk of how she acted in an instant.

In truth, it takes an eternity.

Everything slows down to a glacial pace of time once the words register in the front of her mind. The space between each of her heartbeats may as well be as long as all the life she’s ever lived.

Ba-dum.

_Ba-dum._

Ba—

—dum.

_Ba—_

_Dum._

Blake’s kusarigama is in the air before Adam even looks down, but he’s always been fast. There's enough distance between them that the short, curved blade hurtling towards him just misses as he dodges, every cell in his body still alert and desperately alive.

He meets both of her eyes with the one he has left, and she sees a familiar spark of fury burst into flames behind it.

And then Adam’s right brow arches in shock, as she leans into the throw and _pulls_ at the end of its arc to send it hurtling back the way it came.

It hits right where she means it to, piercing through the skin and sinew of his back. It bursts out of his chest, sliding between his ribs.

“Oh,” he says, with the last breath he can take as the blade collapses his lung. As he starts to drown in his own blood.

He drops to his knees.

He falls forward.

The last cannon fires.

#### **

On the morning of the reaping for the 74th Hunger Games, Blake Belladonna comes home to District 4 with only a small rucksack on her shoulders. She steps off the sleek train that will bring her back to the Capitol, Tukson and her tributes in tow, in only a handful of hours.

It’s a long walk to and from the clearing, but Blake thinks she can make it back in time for the drawing. When she reaches the edge of the concrete platform, she slips out of her shoes and tucks them into her bag. It’s been too long since she’s felt the earth beneath her feet, or the pliant, velvety press of sand between her toes. 

She’s worried that time and the elements might have taken over the small spot in the trees that Adam had marked out as theirs years before, but it looks the same as it always did, even if traces of new growth have started to take root in the sandy soil. 

There’s more sand to clear than there used to be, but it’s easy to brush away, to pull at the haphazard lid of thatch a dead man had woven when he was young.

Nothing’s out of place, even if rust settles like barnacles along the metal of the pot, eating at the metal stand. 

When Blake kneels down to pick up the wooden tinderbox, heat and humidity have taken their toll, the lid expanding to keep it permanently shut. 

She sets it back in its place in the dirt gently, next to a victor’s crown.

Blake pulls the necklace around her neck up and over her head. She rests it in her hand, chain pooling in her palm. The edges of the ring gleam, polished from restless hands brushing pads of restless fingers along the metal for years and years. 

She reaches out over the pit and opens her palm, ring falling to join a collection of long-forgotten things. The lid is replaced, then buried, for the final time.

She walks away.

*

_Your hopes have become my burden. I will find my own liberation._

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> This is my first work of fiction writing in over a decade, and it's definitely far beyond anything I've ever attempted. The last time I finished anything with a plot was the Free Willy-inspired picture book I wrote (and illustrated, tyvm) when I was 9. This meant a lot to be able to think about and work on, and I'm deeply grateful for the experience. As much as I can't help but focus on its flaws, I also know what I did right, and that's been inherently valuable and fulfilling. Even if I was temporarily possessed by using just way more em dashes than I ever tolerate. Thank you, if you've made it this far. 
> 
> This wouldn't exist at all without Sofi, Ash, and Al. I've never had an editor mark my typos with the word "icky" before, and I never will again, as each one turned more and more of me to dust. I'm just dust, typing this. You all kept me going when I truly thought I couldn't and/or shouldn't, and I will always be grateful. And thank you to all the friends who held my hand for the process, too, even when I just needed to clarify my own thoughts. Fran, Sam, you shouldn't be reading this, but if you are, I love you.
> 
> Lastly: this is meant to be the first chapter of a three-part series. I'll get around to the other two... when I get around to them. This entire first chapter was only written so that I could get to Yang's! Alas. I have a tumblr with the same username. You can bother me about it there.
> 
> Lastly lastly: No, I have not seen SPOP. Step off my nuts. My betas already chewed me out for any resemblance to SPOP you may see here. It was not intentional.


End file.
